as the greatest authority in England
on tapestry, and also a cousin of yours. Please remember (or
forgive) the supper on Tuesday, and of your kindness, ask
him to let me see his lot and give me his opinion on mine.
Cochrane had a folly he called a portrait of you in his
studio. I turned its face to the wall; and in the end he
admitted I was right.

"Yours sincerely,

"GEORGE GORING."

Accordingly, on a very hot day early in July, Goring met Mildred again,
at Sir Cyril Meres's house on Campden Hill. The long room at one end of
which stood the small dining-table looked on the greenness of a lawny,
lilac-sheltered garden, so that such light as filtered through the green
jalousies was green also. There was a great block of ice somewhere in
the room, and so cool it was, so greenly dim there, that it seemed
almost like a cavern of the sea. Mildred wore a white dress, and, as
was the fashion of the moment, a large black hat shadowed with
ostrich-feathers. Once more on seeing her he had a startled impression
of looking upon an ethereal creature, a being somehow totally distinct
from other beings; and for lack of some more appropriate name, he called
her again in his mind "Undine." As the talk, which Cyril Meres had a
genius for making general, became more animated, he half lost that
impression in one of a very clever, charming woman, with a bright wit
sailing lightly over depths of knowledge to which he was unaccustomed in
her sex.

The party was not intended to number more than eight persons, of whom
Lady Thomson was one, and they sat down seven. When Sir Cyril observed:
"We won't wait any longer for Davison," Mildred was too much interested
in Goring's presence to inquire who this Davison might be.

She sparkled on half through luncheon to the delight of every one but
Miss Ormond the actress, who would have preferred to play the lead
herself. Then came a pause. A door was opened at the far end of the dim
room, and the missing guest appeared. Sir Cyril rose hastily to greet
him. He advanced without any apologetic hurry in his gait; the same
impassive Maxwell Davison as before, but leaner, browner, more
silver-headed from three more years of wandering under Oriental suns.
Mildred could hardly have supposed it possible that the advent of any
human being could have given her so disagreeable a sensation.

Sir Cyril was unaware that she knew Maxwell Davison; surprised to hear
that he