he obeyed her slightest behests. She kept all the conversation to herself, too, and neither he nor I could edge in a word. I never met anyone who talked so fast, and yet who seemed to say nothing at all. Each subject she began to speak about she changed for another before we had begun even to think of what we meant to reply. Thus her conversation gave me at last a feeling of intense fatigue, and I wondered how a really clever and earnest-minded man like Captain Carbury could endure the thought of spending his life with her.

He went out of the room after a time, and then she told me, with a great yawn, that he was a perfect lover, and that she herself was intensely happy.

"You, of course, will fall in love and get engaged some day," she said. "You are rather good-looking, in the old-world style; personally, I admire the up to date sort of beauty myself, and so, I know, does Vernon. He hates the people who are, as he expresses it, 'all fire and flash in the pan.' That is, I am sure, how he would describe you, if he troubled himself to describe you at all."

"I don't think he would," I said, turning very red. I longed to tell this haughty girl that I was in his gallery of heroines, but I felt instinctively that such a piece of information would only make her jealous, and therefore I refrained.

By and by Captain Carbury returned, and they both went away. She certainly was very dainty. She was like a piece of exquisite china, and, as I said afterwards to Lady Carrington, when she wanted to get my opinion with regard to her:

"I felt almost afraid to look at her, for fear she should break."

Lady Carrington laughed at my description, and said she did not know that I was such a keen observer of character.

This was my very last day with my kindest of friends, for on the next I was to go to Lady Helen's house in Hanbury Square. I knew nothing whatever with regard to this part of London, nor where the smartest houses were, nor where the "classy people," as they called themselves, resided, but Lady Carrington informed me that Hanbury Square was in the very heart of the fashionable world, and that Lady Helen's house was one of the largest and handsomest in the whole square.

"But why is it called Lady Helen's house?" I asked. "Surely it is my father's."

"Of course it is," she replied, and she looked a little grave, just as though she were 

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