Leaving Miss Gerratty at the end of Queen’s Walk by the old Jacobean Market-House, Mrs. Steel drove home alone, to find some half-dozen letters waiting for her, the mid-day post that she had missed by lunching with Mrs. Feveril, of The Cedars. She shuffled the letters irritably through her hands like a pack of cards, her eyes sparkling into sudden vivacity as a foreign envelope showed among the rest. The letter bore the Egyptian Sphinx and pyramids, and the familiar writing of a friend.

The letter lay unopened in her lap awhile, as she sat by the open window of the drawing-room and looked out over the beds that were gorgeous with the flare of Oriental poppies. The lawn, studded with standard roses, swept to the trailing branches of an Indian cedar. Rhododendrons were still in bloom in the little shrubbery under the rich green shade shed by two great oaks.

She tore open the envelope at last, having lingered like one who shirks the reading of news long waited for. The familiar squirl of the man’s handwriting made her smile, bringing back memories of a first serious affaire de cœur with the quaint grotesqueness of the foolish past. She remembered the thin, raw-boned youth with the red mouth and the strenuous eyes who had kissed her one night after a river-party. He was still vivid to her, even to the recollection how his boating-shirt had slipped a button and given her a glimpse of a hairy chest. What a little fool she had been in those days! Mrs. Betty was not the slave of sentimen