m, will you not?"

"I will not," she answered amiably, as if assenting.

"You _will not_?"

He peered at the modern daughter from behind the _Times_, and recognised
in her grey eyes (with as much gratification as such meetings usually
afford us) a lifelong friend. It was his own hereditary obstinacy.

Sylvia went to the door, then turned round and said a shade
apologetically--

"You see, darling, it seems such a wicked _waste_! Surely the money
might be better spent! On--on the unemployed, or something. Why, the
other day he sent a thing from Gerard's so enormous that it came quite
alone in a van; and another came in a four-wheeler. And I wasn't rude,
you know--I kept it."

"I don't quite follow you, my dear. You kept what? The cab?"

"No, the flowers. And I must say it is a pleasure to go and give one's
orders now! The kitchen is like a fete at the Botanical Gardens."

Sir James frowned absently, pretending to be suddenly absorbed in the
paper until she had gone away, and shut the door. Then he put down the
_Times_ carefully, and shook with laughter, comfortably to himself, as
he only laughed when alone. His daughter's way of receiving homage was
very much to his taste.

* * * * *

At the door of the little restaurant in King Street, waiting for him,
Woodville found Ridokanaki.

Slight and thin as he was, with his weary, drooping grey moustache, he
looked always rather unusual and distinguished. He had black, wrinkled,
heavy-lidded eyes, in which Sylvia had discovered a remarkable
resemblance to the eyes of a parrot, though the fire in them was very
far from being extinguished. He wore a gay light red carnation, but the
flowerless Woodville looked far more festive. Woodville's enjoyment of
nearly all experiences which were not absolutely depressing was greater
than ever since his life of self-repression. To dine alone with the
great Ridokanaki on the brink of some kind of sentimental crisis was to
him a kind of intellectual, almost a literary joy, one which Sylvia
could never either share or understand.

Ridokanaki received him with his most courteous manner. Ridokanaki, like
most people, had two remarkably different manners. In society, he had a
certain flowery formality, a conventional _empressement_, that, though
far from being English, was absolutely different from the geniality of
the German, from French tact and bonhomie, and from the Italian grace.
It is a manner I h