facade--in the turreted
"Tuscan villa" style of the 'fifties--and as Miss Brent and Amherst
approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were
just descending from two carriages at the door.

The lamp-light showed every detail of dress and countenance in the
party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white
moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and
professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.

"Why, that must be her party arriving!" Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she
spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed
to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the
projection of her widow's veil.

"Is that Mrs. Westmore?" Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered:
"I suppose so; I've never seen her----" she continued excitedly: "She
looks so like--do you know what her name was before she married?"

He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. "I don't
know--I must have heard--but I never can recall people's names."

"That's bad, for a leader of men!" she said mockingly, and he answered,
as though touched on a sore point: "I mean people who don't count. I
never forget an operative's name or face."

"One can never tell who may be going to count," she rejoined
sententiously.

He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they
passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass
doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: "Does
Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?"

"I fancied so--a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But
isn't this my corner?" she exclaimed, as they turned into another
street, down which a laden car was descending.

Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and
when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her
companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him,
gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden
consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of
the town.

At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked
"Westmore," and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew
out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings,
till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a
grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then h