any _bourse moyenne_, with an eye for beauty. Fine photographs
also, of Italian and Dutch pictures, suggested travel, and struck the
cultivated cosmopolitan note.

Mrs. Verrier looked round it with a smile. It was all as unpretending as
the maid who ushered her upstairs. Daphne would have no men-servants in
her employ. What did two ladies want with them, in a democratic country?
But Mrs. Verrier happened to know that Daphne's maid-servants were just
as costly in their degree as the drawing-room carpet. Chosen for her in
London with great care, attracted to Washington by enormous wages, these
numerous damsels played their part in the general "simplicity" effect;
but on the whole Mrs. Verrier believed that Daphne's household was
rather more expensive than that of other rich people who employed men.

She walked through the room, looking absently at the various photographs
and engravings, till her attention was excited by an easel and a picture
upon it in the back drawing-room. She went up to it with a muttered
exclamation.

"So _she_ bought it! Daphne's amazing!"

For what she saw before her was a masterpiece--an excessively costly
masterpiece--of the Florentine school, smuggled out of Italy, to the
wrath of the Italian Government, some six months before this date, and
since then lost to general knowledge. Rumour had given it first to a
well-known collection at Boston; then to another at Philadelphia; yet
here it was in the possession of a girl of two-and-twenty of whom the
great world was just--but only just--beginning to talk.

"How like Daphne!" thought her friend with malice. The "simple" room,
and the priceless picture carelessly placed in a corner of it, lest any
one should really suppose that Daphne Floyd was an ordinary mortal.

Mrs. Verrier sat down at last in a chair fronting the picture and let
herself fall into a reverie. On this occasion she was dressed in black.
The lace strings of a hat crowned with black ostrich feathers were
fastened under her chin by a diamond that sparkled in the dim greenish
light of the drawing-room; the feathers of the hat were unusually large
and drooping; they curled heavily round the thin neck and long,
hollow-eyed face, so that its ivory whiteness, its fatigue, its fretful
beauty were framed in and emphasized by them; her bloodless hands lay
upon her lap, and the folds of the sweeping dress drawn round her showed
her slenderness, or rather her emaciation. Two years before th