at an absurd creature you are,' exclaims her
sister-in-law, 'but come with me now I want to introduce you to two or
three people--'

'What did I say to annoy her,' thinks Paul, and then seizing the first
opportunity he makes for the door, but his sister stops him on the
threshold.

'Oh, Paul, do be a dear,' she says, 'and get some places for us for the
play, I don't care what, only let it be somewhere proper, for Philippa's
sake not mine, get them for to-morrow night, and come and dine here
beforehand.'

'All right,' he answers, 'I shall probably look in during the morning.
Ta ta.'

Mabel Seaton is a great favourite. She is not what one would call
pretty, but she possesses a bright, cheery face, which is reflected in
miniature in her son Teddy, who is as his uncle says rather the '_enfant
terrible!_' but do not say so before his mother, or her wrath would be
dire. Her husband George is really the only person who dares to
interfere concerning the conduct of that small personage.

Philippa, who up till now has lived with an aunt in Switzerland, having
reached the age of eighteen, has come over to England to be presented
and enter into the vortex of London society. So it is to quite another
world she has come, and she wonders if she will be happy. Life is such
a strange thing, so many beginnings and so few endings.

But the theatre is hardly the place for melancholy meditations, and she
is sitting in the stalls of the L----. Mabel on one side, Paul Ponsonby
on the other; the latter has become deeply interested in Philippa, and
wonders what sort of a woman she will become--a coquette, a flirt? He
glances at her fair, childish face and sighs. The curtain goes up, but
he does not see the scene before him; no, 'tis a woman's face he seems
to see, a pale face, with large brown eyes that are fixed on him with a
look of--pshaw! what had love to do with her. Time had been when love
for that woman had filled his whole being, but there came a day when he
tried to make himself hate her, and he did not succeed. Heigh ho!

'Mr Ponsonby,' Philippa is saying to him, 'do look at that dear little
baby.'

With a start he comes back from the reverie into which he had sunk and
answers at random 'Yes, she always acts perfectly--'

Philippa looks at him in astonishment, how could that child _always_ act
perfectly when it couldn't be more than three, but she says nothing and
watches with interest the play. It is a sad piece of a woman