andervelde.

"Oh, no! Why should it? It just makes me--wonder."

Mrs. Vandervelde said quietly: "I understand." Nancy felt grateful
to her.

A few days later Mrs. Vandervelde said to her casually: "An old
friend of ours dines with us to-night, Anne,--Mr. Berkeley Hayden,
one of the most charming men in the world. I think you will like
him."

Mrs. Vandervelde always said that Berkeley Hayden was the most
critical man of her acquaintance, and that his taste was infallible.
He had an unerring sense of proportion, and that miracle of judgment
which is good taste. He was one of those fortunate people who, as
the saying goes, are born with a gold spoon in the mouth. Unlike
most inheritors of great wealth, he not only spent freely but added
even more freely to the ancestral holdings. He was moneyed enough to
do as he pleased without being considered eccentric; he could even
afford to be esthetic, and to prefer Epicurus to St. Paul. He had a
highly important collection of modern paintings, and an even more
valuable one of Tanagra figurines, old Greek coins, and medieval
church plate. He had, too, the reputation of being the most gun-shy
and bullet-proof of social lions. At thirty he was a handsome,
well-groomed, rather bored personage, with sleekly-brushed blond
hair and a short mustache. He looked important, and one suspected
that he must have been at some pains to keep his waist line so
inconspicuous. For the rest, he was as really cultivated and
pleasing a pagan as one may find, and so wittily ironical he might
have been mistaken for a Frenchman.

Mrs. Vandervelde had planned that he should be the only guest. She
knew this would please him, as well as suit her own purpose, which
was that he should see young Mrs. Peter Champneys. She was curious
to learn what impression Anne would create, and if Berkeley Hayden's
judgment would coincide with her own. She had informed him that
Jason's ward was stopping with them; would, in fact, go abroad with
her shortly. Mr. Hayden was not interested. He thought a ward rather
a bore for the Vanderveldes.

He was standing with his back to the mantel, facing the door, when
Nancy entered the room. In the filmy black Mrs. Vandervelde had
selected for her, tall and slim, she paused for the fraction of a
second and lifted her cool, shining, inscrutable green eyes to his
lazy blue ones. Mrs. Vandervelde had prevailed upon her to retain
her own fashion of wearing her hair in plaits wound ar