Sheila was pleased to hear that. Here was a woman who had a large experience in such matters among those very ladies of her husband’s social circle whom she had been a little afraid to meet. Mrs. Paterson seemed to admire her hair as much as the simple Mairi had done; and Sheila soon began to have less fear of the terrible tiring woman, who forthwith proceeded with her task. The young wife went down stairs with a tower upon her head. She was very uncomfortable. She had seen, it is true, that this method of dressing the hair really became her--or rather would become her in certain circumstances. It was grand, imposing, statuesque, but then she did not feel statuesque just at this moment. She could have dressed herself to suit this style of hair; she could have worn it with confidence if she had got it up herself; but here she was the victim of an experiment. She felt like a school girl about, for the first time, to appear in public in a long dress, and she was terribly afraid her husband would laugh at her. If he had any such inclination he courteously suppressed it. He said the massive simplicity of this dressing of the hair suited her admirably. Mrs. Lavender said that Paterson was an invaluable woman; and then they went down to the dining-room on the ground floor, where luncheon had been laid. The man who had opened the door waited on the two strangers; the invaluable Paterson acted as a sort of hench-woman to her mistress, standing by her chair and supplying her wants. She also had the management of a small pair of silver scales, in which pretty nearly everything that Mrs. Lavender took in the way of solid food was carefully and accurately weighed. The conversation was chiefly alimentary, and Sheila listened with a growing wonder to the description of the devices by which the ladies of Mrs. Lavender’s acquaintances were wont to cheat fatigue or win an appetite or preserve their color. When by accident the girl herself was appealed to, she had to confess to an astonishing ignorance of all such resources. She knew nothing of the relative strengths and effects of wines, though she was frankly ready to make any experiment her husband recommended. She knew what camphor was, but had never heard of bismuth. On cross-examination she had to admit that eau-de-cologne did not seem to her likely to be a pleasant liquor before going to a ball. Did she not know the effect on brown hair of washing it in soda-water every night? She was equably confessing her ignorance on all such points when she was startled by a sudden question from Mrs. Lavender. Did she know what she was doing? She looked at her plate; there was on it a piece of cheese to which she had thoughtlessly helped herself. Somebody had called it Roquefort--that was all she knew. “You have as much there, child, as would kill a ploughman; and I suppose you would not have had the sense to leave it.” “Is it poison?” said Sheila, regarding her plate with horror.