ing on tiptoe.

At Plash the house seemed to shine in the wet air--the tone of the
mottled red walls and the limited but perfect lawn to be the work of an
artist's brush. Lady Davenant was in the drawing-room, in a low chair by
one of the windows, reading the second volume of a novel. There was the
same look of crisp chintz, of fresh flowers wherever flowers could be
put, of a wall-paper that was in the bad taste of years before, but had
been kept so that no more money should be spent, and was almost covered
over with amateurish drawings and superior engravings, framed in narrow
gilt with large margins. The room had its bright, durable, sociable air,
the air that Laura Wing liked in so many English things--that of being
meant for daily life, for long periods, for uses of high decency. But
more than ever to-day was it incongruous that such an habitation, with
its chintzes and its British poets, its well-worn carpets and domestic
art--the whole aspect so unmeretricious and sincere--should have to do
with lives that were not right. Of course however it had to do only
indirectly, and the wrong life was not old Mrs. Berrington's nor yet
Lady Davenant's. If Selina and Selina's doings were not an implication
of such an interior any more than it was for them an explication, this
was because she had come from so far off, was a foreign element
altogether. Yet it was there she had found her occasion, all the
influences that had altered her so (her sister had a theory that she was
metamorphosed, that when she was young she seemed born for innocence) if
not at Plash at least at Mellows, for the two places after all had ever
so much in common, and there were rooms at the great house that looked
remarkably like Mrs. Berrington's parlour.

Lady Davenant always had a head-dress of a peculiar style, original and
appropriate--a sort of white veil or cape which came in a point to the
place on her forehead where her smooth hair began to show and then
covered her shoulders. It was always exquisitely fresh and was partly
the reason why she struck the girl rather as a fine portrait than as a
living person. And yet she was full of life, old as she was, and had
been made finer, sharper and more delicate, by nearly eighty years of
it. It was the hand of a master that Laura seemed to see in her face,
the witty expression of which shone like a lamp through the ground-glass
of her good breeding; nature was always an artist, but not so much of an
ar