rself
that he was angry--and with good reason.

But Mrs. Fairmile still smiled.

"Ah! the Lelys!" she cried, raising her hand slightly toward the row of
portraits on the wall. "The dear impossible things! Are you still
discussing them--as we used to do?"

Daphne started. "You know this house, then?"

The smile broadened into a laugh of amusement, as Mrs. Fairmile turned
to Roger's mother.

"Don't I, dear Lady Barnes--don't I know this house?"

Lady Barnes seemed to straighten in her chair. "Well, you were here
often enough to know it," she said abruptly. "Daphne, Mrs. Fairmile is a
distant cousin of ours."

"Distant, but quite enough to swear by!" said the visitor, gaily. "Yes,
Mrs. Barnes, I knew this house very well in old days. It has many
charming points." She looked round with a face that had suddenly become
coolly critical, an embodied intelligence.

Daphne, as though divining for the first time a listener worthy of her
steel, began to talk with some rapidity of the changes she wished to
make. She talked with an evident desire to show off, to make an
impression. Mrs. Fairmile listened attentively, occasionally throwing in
a word of criticism or comment, in the softest, gentlest voice. But
somehow, whenever she spoke, Daphne felt vaguely irritated. She was
generally put slightly in the wrong by her visitor, and Mrs. Fairmile's
extraordinary knowledge of Heston Park, and of everything connected with
it, was so odd and disconcerting. She had a laughing way, moreover, of
appealing to Roger Barnes himself to support a recollection or an
opinion, which presently produced a contraction of Daphne's brows. Who
was this woman? A cousin--a cousin who knew every inch of the house, and
seemed to be one of Roger's closest friends? It was really too strange
that in all these years Roger should never have said a word about her!

The red mounted in Daphne's cheek. She began, moreover, to feel herself
at a disadvantage to which she was not accustomed. Dr. Lelius,
meanwhile, turned to Mrs. Fairmile, whenever she was allowed to speak,
with a joyous yet inarticulate deference he had never shown to his
hostess. They understood each other at a word or a glance. Beside them
Daphne, with all her cleverness, soon appeared as a child for whom one
makes allowances.

A vague anger swelled in her throat. She noticed, too, Roger's silence
and Lady Barnes's discomfort. There was clearly something here that had
been kept from her--so