And as the fair Ethel vanished through the door, Lady Agatha Hemyock came in by the French window. She was a woman of somewhat stately presence, acquired by long practice of standing on ceremony and on her dignity. Her face was well set off by white hair dressed straight up from her forehead, pompadour fashion, which had the effect of bringing into rather aggressive prominence her sharp physiognomy which she could make, when she chose, the vehicle of a gamut of remarkable expressions. In French phrase, her face jumped at you; nevertheless, had not the nose been rather too long and too sharp she would have been as good-looking as she was wily. Among her ladyship's more prominent accomplishments was an interesting trick of carrying on a conversation with one person while she listened to everything else that was being said in the room; a feat difficult of successful execution, and one which has a tendency to depreciate the performer's popularity. "Where's Ethel?" Lady Agatha inquired sharply, after a preliminary glance round the room to make sure they were alone. "Gone after Mr. Gage," Dagmar informed her, still sore from the consciousness of a lost chance. "How provoking of her," exclaimed her mother, "when I particularly want her to look after Quorn." "Just what I tell her," said Dagmar resentfully. "Mr. Gage," Lady Agatha declared, "will keep. He is a fool, and is to be secured whenever we choose to bring him to the point. Quorn is--er--not such a fool, and if the coronet is to come into the family it is essential that he should be looked after. He ought to have the choice of you." "No money, mother." "Perhaps not. But a nice old place and an aristocratic position." "You've got most of that, mother," Dagmar observed shrewdly, "and you are discontented enough." "Well, you can't both marry Mr. Gage," Lady Agatha argued, ignoring the personal citation. "And if you don't take care, the one he does not choose will lose Quorn as well." "Well, for a peer and a millionaire," Dagmar observed decidedly, "they are the most hopeless specimens. Neither being in the least like what he ought to be, I should prefer the money. It is the only thing here that looks like what it is." "I am thinking of your position, my dear," her mother replied insinuatingly. "Millionaires are getting so common and unpopular." "Peers are common enough," Dagmar retorted. "They made a dozen--and such a dozen--the other day." "Not old ones," rejoined Lady Agatha. "Quorn's peerage is centuries old, and improves with time." "But I don't," returned her daughter pointedly. "And the idea of my descendants swaggering about with a coronet wherever they can put it, in the year 2147 doesn't amuse or comfort me at all, or reconcile me to the fact that nobody, without being told, would take Quorn for a peer, even if he dressed every day in robes and coronet, always supposing he could afford that somewhat expensive get-up."