Miss Hilda Newton was a very pretty, dark girl of a somewhat pronounced type. She had large, perceptive, black eyes, singularly unabashed; a charming little turned-up nose; and a rather large mouth with a good deal of shrewd character about it. She was understood to be a country cousin of Mrs. Halse’s, with whom she had been staying for the last three weeks; but only a very critical and rather unkind eye could have traced the country cousin in her dress, which had a great deal of style and dash about it. She acknowledged Mrs. Halse’s introduction of her with rather excessive self-possession, and after a casual word or two to Mrs. Romayne, addressed herself to Julian; it was she with whom he had disappeared to supper at Lady Bracondale’s “at home,” and they had evidently seen a good deal of one another in the interval. Mrs. Romayne had noticed them together more than once, and she had taken a dislike to Miss Newton’s pretty, independent face and manners. In her present mood it was an absolute relief to her to find in the girl a legitimate excuse for irritation, and a reason for the fact that Mrs. Halse’s speech had somehow undone all the work of the early part of the evening, and set her nerves on edge afresh. “Detestably bad style!” she said to herself angrily, giving an unheeding ear to Mrs. Halse as she watched Miss Newton reply with a little twirl of her fan to an eager question of Julian’s. “Just what one would expect in a cousin of that woman.” Then she became aware that “that woman” was vociferously insisting on changing places with Julian, and that Julian was acceding to the proposition with considerable alacrity; and before she had well realised exactly what the change involved, Mrs. Halse, with much paraphernalia of smelling-bottle, fan, opera-glasses, and programme, was established at her side, and Julian and Miss Newton were seated together at the end of the row, practically isolated by the stream of Mrs. Halse’s conversation. “So horrid to talk across people, isn’t it?” said that lady airily, though no crowd ever collected would have interfered with her flow of language. “This is much more comfortable. My dear Mrs. Romayne, I am simply dying to rave to somebody about your cousin--he is your cousin, isn’t he?--Mr. Falconer, you know. What a splendid man! Of course all the accounts of his work have been most fascinating, but the man himself makes it all seem so much more real, don’t you know. Now, do tell me, is he your first cousin, and do you remember him when he was quite a little boy, and all that sort of thing?” Mrs. Romayne took up her fan and unfurled it. She was looking past Mrs. Halse at Julian and Miss Newton, who were looking over the same programme with their heads rather close together. Her eyebrows were slightly contracted, and her eyes very bright, and the restless movements of the slender hand that held the fan seemed to be an expression of intense inward irritation.