ted on calling his daughter
Olive.

'Oh there, mamma!' cried Olive, looking out of the carriage window; and
the two girls watched their mother, a pretty woman of forty, coming
across the greensward to meet them.

She moved over the greensward in a skirt that seemed a little too
long--a black silk skirt trimmed with jet. As she came forward her
daughters noticed that their mother dyed her hair in places where it
might be suspected of turning grey. It was parted in the middle and she
wore it drawn back over her ears and slightly puffed on either side in
accordance with the fashion that had come in with the Empress Eugenie.
Even in a photograph she was like a last-century beauty sketched by
Romney in pastel--brown, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a thin figure a
little bent. Even in youth it had probably resembled Alice's rather than
Olive's, but neither had inherited her mother's hands--the most
beautiful hands ever seen--and while they trifled with the newly bought
_foulards_ a warbling voice inquired if Olive was sure she was not
tired.

'Five hours in the train! And you, Alice? You must be starving, my dear,
and I'm afraid the saffron buns are cold. Milord brought us over such a
large packet to-day. We must have some heated up. They won't be a
minute.'

'Oh, mamma, I assure you I am not in the least hungry!' cried Olive.

'_La beaute n'a jamais faim, elle se nourrit d'elle meme,'_ replied Lord
Dungory, who had just returned from the pleasure-ground whither he had
gone for a little walk with Arthur.

'You will find Milord the same as ever--_toujours galant_; always
thinking of _la beaute, et les femmes_.'

Lord Dungory was the kind of man that is often seen with the Mrs. Barton
type of woman. An elderly beau verging on the sixties, who, like Mrs.
Barton, suggested a period. His period was very early Victorian, but he
no longer wore a silk hat in the country. A high silk hat in Galway
would have called attention to his age, so the difficulty of costume was
ingeniously compromised by a tall felt, a cross between a pot and a
chimney-pot. For collars, a balance had been struck between the
jaw-scrapers of old time and the nearest modern equivalent; and in the
tying of the large cravat there was a reminiscence, but nothing more, of
the past generation.

He had modelled himself, consciously or unconsciously, on Lord
Palmerston, and in the course of conversation one gathered that he was
on terms of intimacy with the chi