nd disappointed at her not turning out what his
excited fancy had made her that evening at Arthur's Bridge? What was he
to _her_ that any chance man might not have been, after so scanty an
interchange of words?

That was his dominant feeling, or underlying it, as her voice neared the
door of his room, saying:--"Fancy your carrying him away without our
seeing him--so much as thinking of it! I call you a wicked, unprincipled
sister." To which another voice, a maternal sort of voice, said what
must have been: "Don't speak so loud!"--or its equivalent. For the
girl's voice dropped, her last words being:--"_He_ won't hear, at this
distance."

Then, she was actually coming in at the door! He could hear the
prodigious skirt-rustle that is now a thing of womanhood's past--though
we adored every comely example, mind you, we oldsters in those days, for
all that she carried a milliner's shop on her back--and as it climaxed
towards entry had to remember by force how slight indeed had been his
interchange of words with the visitor he wished to see--to see by
hearing, and to touch the hand of twice. For he had counted his coming
privileges in his heart already, even if his reason had made light of
its arithmetic. He would be on the safe side now--so he said to
himself--and think of the elder lady as the player of the leading
_role_. No disparagement to her subordinate; the merest deference to
convention!

There was no mishap about the first meeting; only a narrow escape of
one. The man in the dark reckoned it safest to extend his hand and leave
it, to await the first claimant. He took for granted this would be the
mother, and as his hand closed on a lady's, not small enough to call his
assumption in question, said half interrogatively:--"Lady Ancester?"

"That's Gwen," said his sister's voice. And at the word an electric
shock of a sort passed up his arm, the hand that still held his showing
no marked alacrity to release it.

"Yes, this is _me_," says the voice of its owner, "_that's_ mamma."

Lady Ancester, standing close to her, meets his outstretched hand and
shakes it cordially. Then follows pleasantry about mistaking the mother
for the daughter, with assumption of imperfect or dim vision only to
account for it, and a declaration from Adrian that he had been cautioned
not to confuse the one with the other. There _is_ a likeness, as a
matter of fact, and Irene has talked to him of it. The whole thing is
slighter than the te