rose and began her toilette.

At half-past seven Hattie entered.

"Aren't you ready, miss? Mrs. Palma says you must hurry down, for the
company are all in the parlour, and Mr. Palma has asked for you. Stop
a minute, miss. Your sash is all crooked. There, all right. Let me
tell you there is more lace and velvet downstairs than you can show,
and jewellery! No end of it! But as for born good looks, you can
outface them all."

"Don't I look very pale and jaded?"

"Very white, miss; you always do, and red cheeks would be as much out
of your style as paint on a corpse. I can tell you what you do look
like, more than ever I saw you before; that marble figure with the
dove on its finger, which stands in the front parlour bay-window."

It was Mr. Palma's pet piece of sculpture, a statue of "Innocence,"
originally intended for his library, but Mrs. Palma had pleaded for
permission to exhibit it downstairs.

During Regina's residence in New York scarcely a week elapsed without
her meeting guests at the dinner-table, and the frequency of the
occurrence had quite worn away the awkward shyness with which she had
at first confronted strangers. Yet to-day she felt nervously timid as
she approached the threshold of the brilliant room, and caught a
glimpse of those within.

Two gentlemen stood on the rug talking with Olga, a third sat on a
sofa engaged in conversation with Mrs. Palma, while Mrs. St. Clare
and her daughter entertained two strangers in the opposite corner,
and on a _tete-a-tete_ drawn conspicuously forward under the
chandelier were Mr. Palma and Mrs. Carew.

Regina merely glanced at Olga long enough to observe how handsome she
appeared, in her rose-hued silk, with its rich black lace garniture,
and the spray of crushed pink roses drooping against her neck, then
her gaze dwelt upon the woman under the chandelier.

Unusually tall, and proportionately developed, her size might safely
have been pronounced heroic, and would by comparison have dwarfed a
man of less commanding stature than Mr. Palma; yet so symmetrical was
the outline of face and figure that the type seemed wellnigh
faultless, and she might have served as a large-limbed rounded model
for those majestic women whom Buonaroti painted for the admiration of
all humanity, upon the walls of the Sistine.

The face was oval, with a remarkably low but full brow, a straight
finely-cut nose, very wide between the eyes, which were large,
almond-shaped, and of a s