een more silent. To-day, as she seemed even less inclined to
conversation, although manifestly nervous, Miss Thangue merely drank her
tea with an air of being too comfortable and happy in England and
Capheaton for intellectual effort, and patiently waited for a cue or an
inspiration. But although she too kept silence, memory and imagination
held rendezvous in her circumspect brain, and she stole more than one
furtive glance at her companion.

Lady Victoria Gwynne, one of the tallest women of her time and still one
of the handsomest, had been extolled all her life for that fusion of the
romantic and the aristocratic ideals that so rarely find each other in
the same shell; and loved by a few. Her round slender figure, supple
with exercise and ignorant of disease, her black hair and eyes, the
utter absence of color in her smooth Orientally white skin, the mouth,
full at the middle and curving sharply upward at the corners, and the
irregular yet delicate nose that seemed presented as an afterthought to
save that brilliant and subtle face from classic severity, made her
look--for the most part--as if fashioned for the picture-gallery or the
poem, rather than for the commonplaces of life. Always one of those
Englishwomen that let their energy be felt rather than expressed, for
she made no effort in conversation whatever, her once mobile face had of
late years, without aging, composed itself into a sort of illuminated
mask. As far as possible removed from that other ideal, the British
Matron, and still suggesting an untamed something in the complex centres
of her character, she yet looked so aloof, so monumental, that she had
recently been painted by a great artist for a world exhibition, as an
illustration of what centuries of breeding and selection had done for
the noblewomen of England.

Some years before, a subtle Frenchman had expressed her in such a
fashion that while many vowed he had given to the world an epitome of
romantic youth, others remarked cynically that his handsome subject
looked as if about to seat herself on the corner of the table and smoke
a cigarette. The American artist, although habitually cruel to his
patrons, had, after triumphantly transferring the type to the canvas,
drawn to the surface only so much of the soul of the woman as all that
ran might admire. If there was a hint of bitterness in the lower part of
the face, from the eyes there looked an indomitable courage and much
sweetness. Only in th