little table behind which sat her hostess. Thus, for perhaps as long as
half a minute, Laura thought herself alone.

During that half minute Mrs. Tropenell, with eyes well accustomed to the
shaded light, gazed at her visitor with an eager, searching look, the
look of one who wishes to see more, and to see further, than she has
ever seen before.

But what she saw--all she saw--was the Laura she knew with a knowledge
that was at once so superficially close, and so little intimate. A woman
whose stillness of manner--a manner which at times made her appear
almost inanimate--covered, as Mrs. Tropenell had secret reason to know,
an extraordinary force of negative will power. It was a force which had
even pierced Godfrey Pavely's complacency, and shattered his firm belief
in all the rights that English law bestows on the man who has the good
or ill fortune to be a husband.

As Laura advanced into the room her hostess saw that her visitor's
beautifully shaped head, set proudly and freely on the slender
shoulders, was thrown back in a characteristic gesture of attention,
and, with a touch of reluctance, she admired afresh the masses of fair,
cendré hair drawn back from the forehead in a way which to most women
would have been trying, yet which to this woman lent an air of
eighteenth-century charm and distinction.

There was no colour in Laura Pavely's face, but her eyes, heavy-lidded,
and fringed with eyelashes darker than her hair, were deeply blue.To-night she was wearing a very simple evening dress, a white chiffon tea-gown with a long black lace coat. The under dress was almost high to the throat, but beneath the black lace the wearer's arms, soft, dimpled, and rounded, were bare to the shoulder, and gleamed palely, revealingly.

Mrs. Tropenell wondered whether Laura knew that her arms were unusually lovely; then, for she was a very honest woman, her conscience rebuked her. Laura's faults with regard to men were faults of omission, not of commission. Of course she was aware--she could not help being aware--that she was a singularly attractive and distinguished-looking creature. But she had always taken her own beauty, her own distinction, just as she did the rare, distinctive features of her garden, and the perhaps over-studied charm of her house--as something to be tended and kept beautiful, but also to be guarded from alien indifferent eyes.

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