imes" referred to an appointment at
a Regent Street modiste's, or that the advertisement--"White
wins--Twelve," meant that if she wore white camellias in her hair at the
opera she would give "Beauty" a meeting after it.

Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate conventionalities.
And yet she was a little fast--very fast, indeed, and was a queen of one
of the fastest sets; but then--O sacred shield of a wife's virtue--she
could not have borne to lose her very admirable position, her very
magnificent jointure, and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds!

So, for the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their rendezvous
under the rose.

This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out at Hampton
Court--really went, she was never so imprudent as to falsify her word;
and with the Dowager, who was very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond,
while the world thought her dining at Hampton Court. It was nothing to
anyone, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there;
that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at
Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the grapes and
peaches--she had been a beauty herself, in her own day, and still had
her sympathies--they went on the river, in the little toy that he kept
there for his fair friends' use; floating slowly along in the coolness
of evening, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the
sunset, and doing a graceful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a
certain languid amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for
they were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in the
other.

When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the
clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the
afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but
only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to
feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who
expects you to feel it. The evening was very hot and soft. There was
a low south wind, the water made a pleasant murmur, wending among its
sedges. She was very lovely, moreover; lying back there among her laces
and Indian shawls, with the sunset in the brown depths of her eyes
and on her delicate cheek. And Bertie, as he looked on his liege lady,
really had a glow of the old, real, foolish, forgotten feeling stir at
his heart, as he gazed on her in the half-l