soft-tinted and silken, were pleasing, as were her other appurtenances; the narrow front of her little house, painted freshly in white and green and barred by boxes of yellow wallflower; the serenely unfashionable water-colours of Italy, painted by her mother, on the staircase; and her drawing-room, grey-green and primrose-yellow, with eighteenth-century fans, of which she had a collection, displayed in cabinets, and good old glass.

Mrs. Aldesey herself, behind her tea-table, very faded, very thin, with what the French term a souffreteux little face—an air of just not having taken drugs to make her sleep, but of having certainly taken tabloids to make her digest—seemed already to belong to a passing order of things; an order still sustained, if lightly, by stays, and keeping a prayer-book as punctually in use as a card-case.

Oldmeadow owed her, if indirectly, to the Chadwicks, as he owed so much, even if it was entirely on his own merits that he had won her regard. They had met, years ago, in France; an entirely chance encounter, and probably a futureless one, had it not been for the presence in the hotel at Amboise of the Lumleys. They both slightly knew the Lumleys, and the Lumleys and the Chadwicks were old friends. So it had come about; and if he associated Mrs. Aldesey with tea, he associated her also with perfect omelettes and the Loire. He had liked her at once so much, that, had it not been for an always unseen yet never-repudiated husband in New York, he would certainly, at the beginning, have fallen in love with her. But the unrepudiated husband made as much a part of Mrs. Aldesey’s environment as her stays and her prayer-book. The barrier was so evident that one did not even reflect on what one might have done had it not been there; and indeed, Mrs. Aldesey, he now seemed, after many pleasant years of friendship, to recognize, for all the sense of sweetness and exhilaration she gave him, had not enough substance to rouse or sustain his heart. She was, like the tea again, all savour.

She lifted to-day her attentive blue eyes—with age they would become shrewd—and gave him her fine little hand, blue-veined and ornamented with pearls and diamonds in old settings. She wore long earrings and a high, transparent collar of net and lace. Her earrings and her elaborately dressed hair, fair and faded, seemed as much a part of her personality as her eyes, her delicate nose and her small, slightly puckered mouth that dragged provocatively and prettily at one corner when she smiled. Oldmeadow sometimes wondered if she were happy; but never because of anything she said or did.

“I want to hear about some people called Toner,” he said, dropping into the easy-chair on the opposite side of the tea-table. It was almost always thus that he and Mrs. Aldesey met. He rarely dined out. “I’m rather perturbed. I think that Barney—you remember young Chadwick—is going to marry a Miss Toner—a Miss Adrienne Toner. And I hope you’ll have something to her advantage to tell me. As you know, I’m devoted to Barney and his family.”

“I know. The Lumleys’ Chadwicks. I remember perfectly. The dear boy with the innocent eyes and sulky mouth. Why don’t you bring him to see me? He’s dancing the tango in all his spare moments, I suppose, and doesn’t care about old ladies.” Mrs. Aldesey was not much over forty, but always thus alluded to herself. “Toner,” she took up, pouring out his tea. “Why perturbed? Do you know anything against them? Americans, you mean. We poor expatriates are always seen as keepers to so many curious brethren.—Toner. Celà ne me dit rien.”

“I know nothing against them except that Mrs. Toner, the girl’s mother, died, by arrangement, out at sea, on her yacht—in sunlight. Does that say anything? People don’t do that in America, do they, as a rule? A very opulent lady, I inferred.”

“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Aldesey now ejaculated, as if enlightened. “Can it be? Do you mean, I wonder, the preposterous Mrs. Toner, of whom, fifteen years ago, I had a glimpse, and used to hear vague rumours? She wandered about the world. She dressed in the Empire period: Queen Louise of Prussia, white gauze bound beneath her chin. She had a harp, and warbled to monarchs. She had an astral body, and a Yogi and a yacht and everything handsome about her. The typical spiritual cabotine of our epoch—though I’m sure they must always have existed. Of course it must be she. No one else could have died like that. Has she died, poor woman? On a yacht. Out at sea. In sunlight. How uncomfortable!”

“Yes, she’s dead,” said Oldmeadow resignedly. “Yes; it’s she, evidently. And her daughter is coming down to Coldbrooks this week-end. I’m afraid that unless Barney has too many rivals, he’ll certainly marry her. But what you say leads me to infer that he will have rivals and to hope they may be successful. She will, no doubt, marry a prince.”

“Something Italian, perhaps. Quite a small fortune will do that. Certainly your nice Barney wouldn’t have been at all Mrs. Toner’s affaire. The girl on her own may think differently, for your Barney is, I remember, very engaging, and has a way with him. I don’t know anything about the girl. I didn’t know there was one. There’s no reason why she may not be charming. Our wonderful people have the gift of picking up experience in a generation and make excellent princesses.”

“But she’s that sort, you think. The sort that marries princes and has no traditions. Where did they come from? Do you know that?”

“I haven’t an idea. Yet, stay. Was it not tooth-paste?—Toner’s Peerless Tooth-Paste. Obsolete; yet I seem to see, reminiscently, in far-away nursery days, the picture of a respectable old gentleman with side-whiskers, on a tube. A pretty pink glazed tube with a gilt top to it. Perhaps it’s that. Since it was Toner’s it would be the father’s side; not the warbling mother’s. Well, many of us might wish for as unambiguous an origin nowadays. And, in America, we did all sorts of useful things when we first, all of us, came over in the Mayflower!” said Mrs. Aldesey with her dragging smile.

Oldmeadow gazed upon his friend with an ironically receptive eye. “Have they ever known anyone decent? Anyone like yourself? I don’t mean over here. I mean in America.”

“No one like me, I imagine; if I’m decent. Mrs. Toner essayed a season in New York one winter, and it was then I had my glimpse of her, at the opera, in the Queen Louise dress. A pretty woman, dark, with a sort of soulful and eminently respectable coquetry about her; surrounded by swarms of devotees—all male, to me unknown; and with something in a turban that I took to be a Yogi in the background. She only tried the one winter. She knew what she wanted and where she couldn’t get it. We are very dry in New York—such of us as survive. Very little moved by warblings or astral bodies or millions. As you intimate, she’ll have done much better over here. You are a strange mixture of materialism and ingenuousness, you know.”

“It’s only that we have fewer Mrs. Toners to amuse us and more to do with millions than you have,” said Oldmeadow; but Mrs. Aldesey, shaking her head with a certain sadness, said that it wasn’t as simple as all that.

“Have you seen her? Have you seen Adrienne?” she took up presently, making him his second cup of tea. “Is she pretty? Is he very much in love?”

“I’m going down to Coldbrooks on Saturday to see her,” said Oldmeadow, “and I gather that it’s not to subject her to any test that Barney wants me; it’s to subject me, rather. He’s quite sure of her. He thinks she’s irresistible. He merely wants to make assurance doubly sure by seeing me bowled over. I don’t know whether she’s pretty. She has powers, apparently, that make her independent of physical attractions. She lays her hands on people’s heads and