s
showed a trail of yellow hair and a face alabaster white, save for the
lips that were blood red--an intent face with a kind of terrible beauty,
yet instinct with cruelty. One slender, bloodless hand was in the girl's
hair, and, even without the title, it would have been plain that there
was a deadly purpose in that creeping figure.

"Isn't it horrid?" whispered Goring's neighbor. "Fancy that Mrs. Stewart
letting herself be made to look so dreadful!"

"Who?" asked Goring, horrified. He had not recognized Mildred.

"Why, the girl on the bed's Gertrude Waters, and the Vampire's a cousin
of Sir Cyril Meres. A horrid little woman some people admire, but I
shouldn't think any one would after this. I call it disgusting, don't
you?"

"It's horrible!" gasped George; "it oughtn't to be allowed. What does
that fellow Meres mean by inventing such deviltries? By Jove, I should
like to thrash him!"

The neighbor stared. It was all very well to be horrified at Mrs.
Stewart, but why this particular form of horror?

"Please call me when it's over," said Goring, putting his head down
between his hands.

What an eccentric young man he was! But clever people often were
eccentric.

In due course the _tableau_ was over, and to the relief of one
spectator at least, it was not encored. The next was some harmless
domestic scene with people in short waists. George Goring looked in vain
for Mildred among them, longing to see her, the real lovely her, and
forget the horrible thing she had portrayed. Lady Langham was there, and
his neighbor commended her tediously, convinced of pleasing.

There followed a large and very beautiful picture in the manner of a
great English Pre-Raphaelite. This was called "Thomas the Rhymer,
meeting with the Faerie Queen," but it did not follow the description of
the ballad. The Faerie Queen, a figure of a Botticellian grace, was
coming, with all her fellowship, out of a wonderful pinewood, while
Thomas the Rhymer, handsome and young and lean and brown, his harp
across his back, had just crossed a mountain-stream by a rough bridge.
He appeared suddenly to have beheld her, pausing above him before
descending the heathery bank that edged the wood; and looking in her
face, to have entered at once into the land of Faerie. The pose, the
figure, the face of the Faerie Queen were of the most exquisite charm
and beauty, touched with a something of romance and mystery that no
other woman there except Mildred could