“_I hear_,” he said towards the end of the letter, “_that I’m likely to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her as a school-girl--went to school with her, I think; and she has been asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow--an architect. No. You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years. He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the Correggio. You know the one I mean?_” The letter ended with talk about pictures. Anne read it to the last word, and then sat with it still unfolded in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech under which she sat. Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace. Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting. To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking. She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home. She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty. True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste. As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet. She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion. She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.