to her companions.

“She is beautiful,” said Madam Pappadoulopolos, an expansive, black-eyed, black-haired, black-moustached, black-robed figure, wife of the Greek Consul-General.

“She has the sort of monkey-beauty of all the Blairs,” declared Mrs. Froscombe, the gaunt but romantic wife of the British Adviser to the Ministry of Irrigation. She spoke authoritatively. She had recently purchased a richly illustrated volume dealing with the history of that eminent family.

“It is a great responsibility for Lord Blair,” said Lady Smith-Evered. “Now that poor Lady Blair has been dead for over a year, he felt that he ought not to leave his only daughter, his only child, with her relations in England any longer; and, of course, it is very right that she should take her place as mistress here at the Residency, though I could really have acted as hostess for him perfectly well.”

“Indeed yes,” Madam Pappadoulopolos assented, warmly.

“You have a genius for that sort of thing,” murmured Mrs. Froscombe, staring out of the window at the moonlit garden.

“Thank you, Gladys dear,” said Lady Smith-Evered, smiling coldly at her friend’s averted face.

Muriel Blair’s type of beauty was in a way monkey-like, if so ludicrous a term can be employed in a laudatory sense to describe a face of great charm. She was of about the average height; her head was gracefully set upon her excellent neck and shoulders; and there was a sort of airy dignity in her carriage and step. Her enemies called her sullen at times, and named her Moody Muriel; her friends, on the contrary, described her as a personification of the spirit of Youth; while her feminine intimates said that, except for her dislike of the cold, she might have earned her living as a sculptor’s model.

She possessed a much to be envied mane of rather coarse brown hair which she wore coiled high upon her head; and her skin was that of a brunette, though there was some nice colour in her cheeks. Her eyes were good, and she had the habit of staring at her friends, sometimes, in a manner which seemed to indicate a fortuitous mimicry of childlike and incredulous questioning.

It was perhaps the tilt of her small nose and an occasional setting of her jaw which caused her undoubted beauty to be called monkey-like; or possibly it was the occasional defiance of her brown eyes, or the puckering of her eyebrows, or sometimes the sudden and whimsical 

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