. He couldn't but suspect Tante's motives in wanting them to give
a little dinner-party for her. But he feigned the most genial interest
in the plan and agreed with Karen that they must ask their very nicest
to meet Tante.

Betty had helped Karen with all her dinners; she had seen as yet very
little of the great woman, and entered fully into Karen's eagerness that
everything should be very nice.

"Gregory will take her in," said Betty; "and we'll put Bertram Fraser on
her other side. He's always delightful. And we'll have the
Canning-Thompsons and the Overtons and the Byngs; the Byngs are so
decorative!" Constance Armytage was now Mrs. Byng.

"And my dear old General," said Karen, sitting at her desk with a paper
on her knee and an obedient pencil in her hand; "I forget his name, but
we met him at the dinner that you gave after we married; you know,
Betty, with the thin russet face and the little blue eyes. May he take
me in?"

"General Montgomery. Yes; that is a good idea; glorious old man. Though
Lady Montgomery is rather a stodge," said Betty; "but Oliver can have
her."

"I remember, a sleek, small head--like a turtle--with salmon-pink
feathers on it. Poor Oliver. Will he mind?"

"Not a bit. He never minds anything but the dinner; and with Mrs. Barker
we can trust to that."

"Tante often likes soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea.
"Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be
drab-coloured without them."

So it was arranged. Bertram Fraser was an old family friend of the
Jardines'. His father was still the rector of their Northumberland
parish, and he and Gregory and Oliver had hunted and fished and shot and
gone to Oxford together. Bertram had been a traveller in strange
countries since those days, had written one or two clever books and was
now in Parliament. The Overtons, also country neighbours, were fond of
music as well as of hunting, and Mr. Canning-Thompson was an eminent, if
rather ponderous, Q.C., for whose wife, the gentle and emaciated Lady
Mary, Gregory had a special affection. She was a great philanthropist
and a patient student of early Italian art, and he and she talked
gardens and pictures together.

Betty and Oliver were the first to arrive on the festal night, Betty's
efficiency, expressed by all her diamonds and a dress of rose-coloured
velvet, making up for whatever there might be of inefficiency in Karen's
appearance and deportment. Karen was still, touchin