A sudden vivid recollection of the last time she had met him, swept through her mind, as she stood waiting admittance. How desolate she had been. How shy. How filled with the sense of being an outsider, a forgotten guest, unbidden to the banquet of life! The door opened, and it was Hugh himself who drew her over the threshold, and welcomed her in the loud, kind voice she remembered. “We’ve been waiting for you all the morning,” he declared, “and I rushed down when I heard the bell. Come in and let me look at you! It’s impossible to see anything in this wretched foggy atmosphere.” With his arm still round her shoulder, he pushed open the door of a large room on the right of the hall. “Here she is, Alice!” he exclaimed, as his wife rose from a sofa near the fire. “Why Anne, what have you done to yourself?” The words were uttered in amazement. Anne had slipped off her heavy cloak, and stood laughing tremulously as she held her brother by both hands, and noticed for the first time that his hair was white, and his good-natured bronzed face lined and wrinkled. She turned from him to greet her sister-in-law. The slim little creature she remembered was a stout matron, whose hair was just touched with grey. Alice’s start of amazement as she gazed a moment before she kissed her, was almost comic. “Why, Anne, my dear, you’ve grown quite a beautiful woman!” declared her brother, so simply that the tears sprang to Anne’s eyes. “She’s grown younger, hasn’t she, Alice?” He looked at her with a puzzled expression. Anne laughed, and touched her hair. “But it’s your white hair that---- And yet I don’t know. It’s you altogether! I never saw such a change. You---- She looks like a great lady in a French picture, doesn’t she, Alice? Court of one of the French kings. Louis the Sixteenth, that sort of thing.” Anne laughed again. “My dear boy. You make me embarrassed. Don’t stare at me so,” she begged. The pink colour sprang into her cheeks, and the shy deprecating smile of François’ portrait crept for a moment to her lips. “I’m just Anne--twenty years older than when you last saw me.” “Well--it’s magic. I give it up,” declared Hugh. “Where are the boys?” she asked, turning with a quick, eager movement to her sister-in-law. “I want to see my nephews.” “They’re out to-day. I’m so sorry. They’ve gone to lunch with some relations of mine. But you’ll see them this evening. I let them go because I knew that you would want to talk to Hugh,” Alice answered. “You’ll excuse me a little while, won’t you? I must speak to cook.” Her voice--her tone of deference, marked Alice’s recognition of the change in the woman she had once regarded as insignificant, a poor meek creature to be treated with compassion and tolerance; and her husband’s awkward laugh as she closed the door, was sufficient indication that her altered attitude was not lost upon him.