u to make Miss Brooke's
acquaintance as soon as you can. I don't understand her, and I think
that you can help me."

"As how!"

"Oh, don't be silly. You always get on with girls, and you can tell me
what you think of her."

Oliver raised his eyebrows, took a peach from the dish before him, and
began to peel it with great deliberation.

"Handsome, you say?"

"Very."

"Like Lady Alice? I remember her; a willowy, shadowy creature, with a
sort of ethereal loveliness which appealed very strongly to my
imagination when I was a boy."

Mrs. Romaine flushed a little. It occurred to her that _she_ had never
been called shadowy or ethereal-looking.

"She is much more substantial than Lady Alice," she said, drily. "I
should say that she had more individuality about her. She looks to me
like a girl of character and intellect."

"In which case your task will be the more difficult, you mean?"

"I don't know what you mean by a task. I have not set myself to do
anything definite."

"No? Then you are very unlike your sex, Rosalind. I generally find women
much too definite--damnably so."

"Well, then, I must be an exception. You are always trying to entrap me
into damaging admissions, Oliver, and I won't put up with it. All that I
want is to be sure that Lady Alice shall not return to her husband. But
there is nothing definite in that."

"Oh, nothing at all," said Oliver, satirically. "All that you have got
to do is to prejudice father and daughter against each other as much as
possible, make Brooke believe that the girl has been set against him by
her mother, and persuade Miss Brooke that her father is not the sort of
man that Lady Alice can return to. Nothing definite in that, is there?"

"Oliver, you are quite too bad. I never made any plans of the kind." But
there was a distinctly guilty look in Mrs. Romaine's soft eyes.
"Besides, that is a piece of work which hardly needs doing. Father and
daughter are too much alike to get on."

"Alike, are they?"

"Yes, in a sense. The girl is very like her mother, too--she has Lady
Alice's features and figure, but the expression of her face is her
father's. And her eyes and her brow are her father's. And she is like
her father--I think--in disposition."

"You have found out so much that I think you scarcely need me to
interview her in order to tell you more. What do you want me to do?"

"I want to find out more about Lady Alice. Could you not get Ethel
Kenyon to ask her ab