hand, what player to pick out first.

"I choose Miss Silvester," she said--with a special emphasis laid on the
name.

At that there was another parting among the crowd. To us (who know her),
it was Anne who now appeared. Strangers, who saw her for the first
time, saw a lady in the prime of her life--a lady plainly dressed in
unornamented white--who advanced slowly, and confronted the mistress of
the house.

A certain proportion--and not a small one--of the men at the lawn-party
had been brought there by friends who were privileged to introduce
them. The moment she appeared every one of those men suddenly became
interested in the lady who had been chosen first.

"That's a very charming woman," whispered one of the strangers at the
house to one of the friends of the house. "Who is she?"

The friend whispered back.

"Miss Lundie's governess--that's all."

The moment during which the question was put and answered was also the
moment which brought Lady Lundie and Miss Silvester face to face in the
presence of the company.

The stranger at the house looked at the two women, and whispered again.

"Something wrong between the lady and the governess," he said.

The friend looked also, and answered, in one emphatic word:

"Evidently!"

There are certain women whose influence over men is an unfathomable
mystery to observers of their own sex. The governess was one of those
women. She had inherited the charm, but not the beauty, of her unhappy
mother. Judge her by the standard set up in the illustrated gift-books
and the print-shop windows--and the sentence must have inevitably
followed. "She has not a single good feature in her face."

There was nothing individually remarkable about Miss Silvester, seen in
a state of repose. She was of the average height. She was as well made
as most women. In hair and complexion she was neither light nor dark,
but provokingly neutral just between the two. Worse even than this,
there were positive defects in her face, which it was impossible to
deny. A nervous contraction at one corner of her mouth drew up the
lips out of the symmetrically right line, when, they moved. A nervous
uncertainty in the eye on the same side narrowly escaped presenting the
deformity of a "cast." And yet, with these indisputable drawbacks, here
was one of those women--the formidable few--who have the hearts of men
and the peace of families at their mercy. She moved--and there was some
subtle charm, Sir, in