d mentioned, while we waited, people
and things: that Obert, R.A., was somewhere in the train, that her
husband was to bring on Lady John, and that Mrs. Froome and Lord Lutley
were in the wondrous new fashion--and their servants too, like a single
household--starting, travelling, arriving together. It came back to me
as I sat there that when she mentioned Lady John as in charge of
Brissenden the other member of our trio had expressed interest and
surprise--expressed it so as to have made her reply with a smile:
"Didn't you really know?" This passage had taken place on the platform
while, availing ourselves of our last minute, we hung about our door.

"Why in the world _should_ I know?"

To which, with good nature, she had simply returned: "Oh, it's only that
I thought you always did!" And they both had looked at me a little
oddly, as if appealing from each other. "What in the world does she
mean?" Long might have seemed to ask; while Mrs. Brissenden conveyed
with light profundity: "_You_ know why he should as well as I, don't
you?" In point of fact I didn't in the least; and what afterwards struck
me much more as the beginning of my anecdote was a word dropped by Long
after someone had come up to speak to her. I had then given him his cue
by alluding to my original failure to place her. What in the world, in
the year or two, had happened to her? She had changed so extraordinarily
for the better. How could a woman who had been plain so long become
pretty so late?

It was just what he had been wondering. "I didn't place her at first
myself. She had to speak to me. But I hadn't seen her since her
marriage, which was--wasn't it?--four or five years ago. She's amazing
for her age."

"What then _is_ her age?"

"Oh--two or three-and-forty."

"She's prodigious for that. But can it be so great?"

"Isn't it easy to count?" he asked. "Don't you remember, when poor Briss
married her, how immensely she was older? What was it they called it?--a
case of child-stealing. Everyone made jokes. Briss isn't yet thirty."
No, I bethought myself, he wouldn't be; but I hadn't remembered the
difference as so great. What I had mainly remembered was that she had
been rather ugly. At present she was rather handsome. Long, however, as
to this, didn't agree. "I'm bound to say I don't quite call it beauty."

"Oh, I only speak of it as relative. She looks so well--and somehow so
'fine.' Why else shouldn't we have recognised her?"

"Why indee