is Ford.”

“Ford,” said his companion; “that does not tell much. And not pretty, you say?”

“Pretty, oh, yes. No, not exactly pretty,” and a vision of Maisie’s clear cold profile and—yes, there was no denying it—most lovely eyes, rose before him. “More than pretty,” he would have said had he not been afraid of being laughed at. “I don’t really know how to describe her, and it is of less than no consequence. I don’t suppose I shall ever see her again,” and he went on to talk of other matters.

He did see her again, however, and it was, as will have already been supposed, at Lady Valence’s garden-party that he did so. It was a cold day, of course. The weather, with its usual consideration, had changed that very morning, after having been, for May, really decently mild and agreeable. The wind had veered round to the east, and it seemed not improbable that the rain would look in, an uninvited guest, in the course of the afternoon.

Lady Valence declared herself in despair, but as nobody could remember the weather ever being anything but highly detestable the day of her garden-party, it is to be hoped that she in reality took it more philosophically than she allowed, Despard strode about feeling very cold, and wondering why he had come, and why, having come, he stayed. There was a long row of conservatories and ferneries, and glass-houses of every degree of temperature not far from the lawn, where at one end the band was playing, and at the other some deluded beings were eating ices. Despard shivered; the whole was too ghastly. A door in the centre house stood invitingly open, and he turned in. Voices near at hand, female voices, warned him off at one side, for he was not feeling amiable, and he hastened in the opposite direction. By degrees the pleasant warmth, the extreme beauty of the plants and flowers amidst which he found himself, the solitariness, too, soothed and subdued his irritation.

“If I could smoke,” he began to say to himself, when, looking round with a half-formed idea of so doing, he caught sight amidst the ferns of feminine drapery. Some one was there before him—but a very quiet, mouse-like somebody. A somebody who was standing there motionless, gazing at the tall tropical plants, enjoying, apparently, the warmth and the quiet like himself.

“That girl in black, that sphinx of a girl again—by Jove!” murmured Despard under his breath, and as he did so, she turned and saw him.

Her first glance was of annoyance; he saw her clearly from where he stood, there was no mistaking the fact. But, so quickly, that it was difficult to believe it had been there, the expression of vexation passed. The sharply contracted brows smoothed; the graceful head bent slightly forward; the lips parted.

“How do you do, Mr Norreys?” she said. “We are always running against each other unexpectedly, are we not?”

Her tone was perfectly natural, her manner expressed simple pleasure and gratification. She was again the third, the rarest of her three selves—the personality which Despard, in his heart of hearts, believed to be herself.

He smiled—a slightly amused, almost a slightly condescending smile, but a very pleasant one all the same. He could afford to be pleasant now. Poor silly little girl—she had given in with a good grace, a truce to her nonsense of regal airs and dignity; a truce, too, to the timid self-consciousness of her first introduction.

“She understands better now, I see,” he thought. “Understands that a little country girl is but—ah, well—but a little country girl. Still, I must allow—” and he hesitated as his glance fell on her; it was the first time he had seen her by daylight, and the words he had mentally used did not quite “fit”—“I must allow that she has brains, and some character of her own.”

“I can imagine its seeming so to you,” he said aloud. “You have, I think you told me, lived always in the country. Of course, in the country one’s acquaintances stand out distinctly, and one remembers every day whom one has and has not seen. In town it is quite different. I find myself constantly forgetting people, and doing all sorts of stupid things, imagining I have seen some one last week when it was six months ago, and so on. But people are really very good-natured.”

She listened attentively.

“How difficult it must be to remember all the people you know!” she said, with the greatest apparent simplicity; indeed, with a tone of almost awe-struck reverence.

“I simply don’t attempt it,” he replied.

“How—dear me, I hardly know how to say it—how very good and kind of you it is to remember me,” she said.

Mr Norreys glanced at her sharply.

Was she playing him off? For an instant the appalling suggestion all but took his breath away, but it was quickly dismissed. Its utter absurdity was too self-evident; and the expression on her face reassured him. She seemed so innocent as she stood there, her eyes hidden for the moment by their well-fringed lids, for she was looking down. A faint, the very faintest, suspicion of a blush coloured her cheeks, there was a tiny little trembling about the corners of her mouth. But somehow these small evidences of confusion did not irritate him as they had done when he first met her. On the contrary. “Poor little girl,” he said to himself. “I see I must be careful. Still, she will live to get over it, and one cannot be positively brutal.”

For an instant or two he did not speak.

Then: “I never pay compliments, Miss Ford,” he said, “but what I am going to say may sound to you like one. However, I trust you will not dislike it.”

And again he unaccountably hesitated—what was the matter with him? He meant to be kindly encouraging to the girl, but as she stood beside him, looking up with a half-curious, half-deprecating expression in her eyes, he was conscious of his face slightly flushing; the words he wanted refused to come, he felt as if he were bewitched.

“Won’t you tell me what you were going to say?” she said at last. “I should so like to hear it.”

“It’s not worth saying,” he blurted out. “Indeed, though I know what I mean, I cannot express it. You—you are quite different from other girls, Miss Ford. It would be impossible to confuse you with the crowd. That’s about the sum of what I was thinking, though—I meant to express it differently. Certainly, in the way I have said it, no one by any possibility could take it for a compliment.”

To his surprise she looked up at him with a bright smile, a smile of pleasure, and—of something else.

“On the contrary, I do take it as a compliment, as a very distinct compliment,” she said, “considering whom it comes from. Though, after all, it is scarcely I that should accept it. The—the circumstances of my life may have made me different—my having been so little in town, for instance. I suppose there are some advantages in everything, even in apparent disadvantages.”

Her extreme gentleness and deference put him at his ease again.

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “For my part, I often wish I had never been anywhere or seen anything! Life would, in such a case, seem so much more interesting. There would be still things left to dream about.”

He sighed, and there was something genuine in his sigh. “I envy people who have never travelled, sometimes,” he added.

“Have