Modelling his clay outside, Mr. Arbuthnot smiled good-humouredly to himself at the remark. ‘Now, to me--you mustn’t mind my saying so--lovely woman is never so lovely as when she is absolutely a woman! Dead against the higher education business--girl graduates--platform females--you know the style of thing I mean. Only one out of my tribe of sisters, Vic, the eldest, works at her needle--my favourite sister from my cradle.’ Rex Basire felt that he threw a shade of discriminative, yet unmistakable flattery into this avowal of family preference. Dinah held her peace, having in her possession none of those useful colloquial counters which less uninformed persons have agreed to accept as coin. Rex Basire’s generalisation about husbands lingered in her mind with unpleasant, with personal significance. Was it possible that Gaston’s coolness towards her had become matter of comment in the idle little world to which Linda Thorne and Lord Rex Basire both belonged? ‘I work at my needle,’ she remarked presently, ‘because I am not gifted enough to do better things. If I had talent, a tenth part of talent like Gaston’s, I should not spend my time counting threads of canvas.’ So the discriminative flattery had fallen through. Lord Rex tapped his exceedingly white teeth with the top of his cane. He searched diligently throughout the length and breadth of his brain for subject-matter, and found the land naked. His want of inspiration must, he began to think, be Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fault. These constant allusions to the absent husband were crushingly unsuggestive; tended, indeed, towards irksomeness. Arbuthnot was a well-looking man enough, of the usual American type, clever, possibly, in his way,--could knead up clay into droll little figures, and sing French songs without accent! It was distinctly not to listen to Gaston Arbuthnot’s praises that Lord Rex had toiled under a hot sun, and at this ‘unholy hour,’ from Fort-William Barracks up to Miller’s Sarnian Hotel. He asked himself if Dinah were really as beautiful as during the past two days and nights she had appeared before him in his dreams? With a world full of charming women, most of them disposed, thought Lord Rex, to value one adequately, were this particular woman’s good graces high enough stakes to be worth playing for? Was she really, if one watched her dispassionately, so beautiful? Dinah set up her frame, and, leaning over it, began, or went through the semblance of beginning, to count her stitches. In doing so the line of down-bent golden head, the sweep of lash on the pink cheek, the outline of throat and shoulder, were given with full unconscious effect to Lord Rex. And the young man’s heresy left him. Whatever his other scepticisms, he felt, while he lived he could never doubt more on one subject, the flawlessness of Dinah Arbuthnot’s beauty.