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thing for the portrait. But just now it was not of the portrait that she was thinking.

Mrs Sigismund Corder was a dark-skinned woman of three and thirty, with a face redeemed from ugliness by fine eyes, good hair and expressive mouth. Her dress suited the woman no less than it agreed with the fashion. Her pose was now perfectly free from stiffness and self-consciousness. But, if her thoughts of Lady Mary Frozier made her easy work for pencil or brush, Lady Mary's thoughts of what her picture's subject was thinking of its painter interfered seriously with the work in hand.

"One way and another," she said at last, with concessive laughter-and to Mrs Corder even this laughter had its note of restraint-" one way and another, we have pretty well taken stock of each other. I am not going to ask what you thought while you were staring me out of countenance, Mrs Corder. But there is one thing I really must know."

"I'll tell you, then," said Mrs Corder, without turning her head.

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What was it made you want to know anything more about me at all?

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Well-partly yourself—your face-your manner—”

"Is anything wrong with my face and my manner?" asked Lady Mary.

"They're both for the world-and both perfect. If you have ever thought about it, you must know that. But eachor, rather, both have a peculiarity."

"Please tell me what it is?"

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'They're veiled. Or, I think, they are a veil-your veil. Most people, whether as good and beautiful as you are, or plain and ordinary like me-most people are close to their faces. I think you live a long way off behind yours. Perhaps that is why those absurd forty years you swear to have only marked twenty-eight on the dial."

"You give me," said Lady Mary, laughing, "a most horrid mental picture of myself. I seem to see a sort of wax mask, with mouth and eyelids capable of twitching at the correct moment, and worked by electricity from a head office."

"That only shows," replied the other, "how badly I express myself. You have quite the most beautiful face I know. It's expressive and sympathetic, too. But-well-you would let all the world, perhaps, come to you, but-but I think that to none of them all do you ever go out."

"I dare say you are right," said are right," said Lady Mary, in a voice no less gentle, yet somewhat colder than before; and then, reflectively, Perhaps very nearly right," she

added.

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Mrs Sigismund Corder might, in spite of the touch of frost in her painter's voice, have pursued the subject—which was, at least in its later phase, not of her own introduction.

But interruption came; and with it for Mrs Corder a measure of enlightenment.

A bell rang with quick, divided pulsation. There was a short phrase of excuse, and with a swift turn the painter crossed the room to its door, laying down her palette as she

went.

Before her back was turned Mrs Corder had caught no glimpse of Lady Mary's face. But something in the bearing of the graceful figure as it vanished convinced her that whoever had rung the bell would find that face no barrier to what was to pass between them.

And, when Lady Mary returned, followed by a young man of good figure and carriage, Mrs Corder knew that she had not read Lady Mary's back amiss. For on her face were the last tints of a dying flush, and in her eyes was the after-glow of the feeling Mrs Corder had suspected.

"I hope you are not angry with me," said Lady Mary, as she entered, pushing back a little wandering lock of hair near the left ear; and Mrs Corder noticed that, while the face of the woman paled slowly, the finger-nails and tips showed pinker than their wont against the delicate skin of cheek and forehead. "You see," she continued, "I know his ring. And I haven't seen the dear boy for three weeks." Here she laughed gaily. "But I'm forgetting. The personalities we have been exchanging, Mrs Corder, have tricked me into thinking us intimate. And of course you don't know who 'the dear boy' is."

With her right hand extended Mrs Corder stepped down from the dais.

"The personalities were mine, Lady Mary," she said. "But I am afraid they have failed in their trickery. Perhaps," she added, as the youth took her hand, "Mr Le Dane will help me, though. I do know who the 'dear boy' is, very well. But it's a long time since we met."

"Not so very long," said Mr Le Dane, smiling.

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We use different standards,” replied Mrs Corder. "But

it's not very kind to remind us of it. Perhaps Sigismund and I and Elmira have fast watches and short foot-rules."

"I didn't mean to be rude-you know that," answered Le Dane. "But I've been so busy and done such a lot while I've been away that the time has passed very quickly for me. I was coming round to-night-after dinner-if I can, and if I may. Shall you be at home?"

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Of course," said Mrs Corder, heartily. "And now I'll be off. I shall be quite popular at home, bringing such news." Anthony Le Dane preceded her down the narrow passage from the studio, crossed the wider hall and opened the front door. Mrs Corder overtook him on the steps.

"Your aunt didn't know we were friends, Anthony?" she said interrogatively, as they walked down the flagged path to her hired victoria.

"I must have spoken of you all, often enough," he replied; then added, with an after-thought: "But not lately, I think."

"Then that's why," said Mrs Corder, as she got into the carriage. "It's only since you went away that I have come to know her." Then, with a pretty wave of the hand, and a "Don't forget to-night," she drove away.

But if she had seen Anthony Le Dane leap up the steps, she would have known that it was not of after dinner that he was thinking.

CHAPTER II

ANTHONY LE DANE

LADY MARY had said that her studio was too bare and ugly to drink tea in. Yet, when Anthony opened the door again, and stood a moment at the top of the five steps that led to its floor, the dull-coloured and lofty room struck his senses as pleasanter than ever before. And than this he could give it praise no higher.

By some magic of domestic dexterity, the tea-table had been already transported from the boudoir to the paintingroom; and through the doorway connecting the two a broad band of sunlight fell across the studio floor.

There, flooded for half her height only with this golden beam which made its glad inroad so fearlessly upon the clear and colder light from the high north window, stood the friend that was the first he could remember, the friend most often thought of, the friend he would surely last forget. And Anthony, before his foot touched the first downward step of the little flight, noticed, as his eyes met hers upturned, that, though only from waist to shoe-tip was she bathed in the stream of golden light, her face seemed illumined with a radiance even brighter.

He came down and seated himself near the table. Lady Mary finished the making of fresh tea, and then,

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Get off that horrid old stool," she said, " and be comfortable, dear lad."

Anthony laughed.

If I hadn't felt at home, dear, the moment I rang the bell," he said, "I should now. Often as I have told you I like your painting-stool best, you never will believe it. And that," he added, with a sudden thought, "is because you've never found out how I came to prefer it.'

Lady Mary beamed on him and poured out his tea. "You have perched yourself there," she said, "whenever you could, since your little dangling feet wouldn't reach the second bar. And when I have tried to get you off it, you have given me, at one time and another, a hundred reasons for stick

ing to your perch, little boy. But of course I don't know which of all those was the true reason.'

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"I dare say they were all true enough," replied the youth, hitching the heels of his brown boots on the lower rail of the stool, since his legs were now too long for dangling; "but this is the best and truest. I think I was nine years old before I discovered how beautiful you are. And then, by watching you, I found out you were best of all to look at when you were doing nothing; and I used to get on this stool to keep you from working. You don't often sit on it when you paint; but you didn't often paint when I perched myself here.

to tell me stories."

You used

While he began to drink his tea, Lady Mary crossed the room, and returned with a shabby sketch-book in her hand. "What have you got there, aunt?" he asked. Something new to show me?"

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No, Tony. Something old-but something you have never seen.'

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She opened the book, turning the leaves rapidly till she found what she wanted.

"What is it?" asked Anthony, with interest; and he noticed that her long hand made the leaves tremble a little as she turned them.

"It's only the reason why I couldn't work when you were nine years old and sat where you sit now," she answered; and gave him the book. "But I can now-a-days, you know," she added with a smile; and therewith tied her apron, picked up her brushes, and proceeded to prove her words.

Hunched, in spite of his stature, with neither discomfort nor awkwardness, upon that uncompromising stool, Anthony Le Dane sat for some minutes in silence, peering through halfclosed eyelids at the drawing in the old, shabby sketch-book. And every now and again Lady Mary Frozier glanced at him sideways.

With her second glance he lifted a hand as of a man reading and fearing interruption. At this gesture, which she knew for an answer to the turning of her eyes which his had not risen to meet, her lips curved into a smile of which the sweetness was for the man that could not see it, and the bitterness for herself, that could not forget.

Anthony Le Dane had been bred in a good school for the development of the critical faculty. From very early days he had been taken to see pictures. He had seen pictures grow

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