ly froze more and more, while she answered with
politeness; and Lady Ethelrida, watching quietly for a while, grew
further puzzled.

It was certainly a mask this extraordinary and beautiful young woman was
wearing, she felt, and presently, when Lady Coltshurst who had remained
rather silently aloof, only fixing them all in turn with her long
eyeglasses, drew the girls aside to talk to her by asking for news of
their mother's headache, Ethelrida indicated she and Zara might sit down
upon the nearest, stiff, French sofa; and as she clasped her thin, fine
hands together, holding her pale gray gloves which she did not attempt
to put on again, she said gently:

"I hope we shall all make you feel you are so welcome, Zara--may I call
you Zara? It is such a beautiful name I think."

The Countess Shulski's strange eyes seemed to become blacker than
ever--a startled, suspicious look grew in them, just such as had come
into the black panther's on a day when Francis Markrute whistled a
softly caressing note outside its bars: what did this mean?

"I shall be very pleased if you will," she said coldly.

Lady Ethelrida determined not to be snubbed. She must overcome this
barrier if she could, for Tristram's sake.

"England and our customs must seem so strange to you," she went on. "But
we are not at all disagreeable people when you know us!" And she smiled
encouragingly.

"It is easy to be agreeable when one is happy," Zara said. "And you all
seem very happy here--_sans souci_. It is good."

And Ethelrida wondered. "What can make you so unhappy, you beautiful
thing, with Tristram to love you, and youth and health and riches?"

And Zara thought, "This appears a sweet and most frank lady, but how can
I tell? I know not the English. It is perhaps because she is so well
bred that she is enabled to act so nicely."

"You have not yet seen Wrayth, have you?" Ethelrida went on. "I am sure
you will be interested in it, it is so old."

"Wr--ayth--?" Zara faltered. She had never heard of it! What was Wrayth?

"Perhaps I do not pronounce it as you are accustomed to think of it,"
Ethelrida said kindly. She was absolutely startled at the other's
ignorance. "Tristram's place, I mean. The Guiscards have owned it ever
since the Conqueror gave it to them after the Battle of Hastings, you
know. It is the rarest case of a thing being so long in one family, even
here in England, and the title has only gone in the male line, too, as
yet. But