Daphne gave a visible start. She had mused upon the possibility of meeting her acquaintance of yesterday, and had decided that the thing was unlikely. Yet her spirits had been buoyed by a lurking idea that he might crop up somehow before the day was done. But to find him here at the very beginning of things was startling. ‘Did you know that we were coming here to-day?’ she faltered. ‘Hadn’t the slightest idea; but I wanted to see the place myself,’ he answered coolly. Daphne blushed rosy-red, deeply ashamed of her foolish, impulsive speech. The stranger had been sitting in that cool shade for the last ten minutes, and his eyes had grown accustomed to the obscurity. He saw the blush, he saw the bright expressive face under the muslin hat, the slim figure in the white frock, every line sharply accentuated against a gray background, the slender hand in a long Swedish glove. She looked more womanly in her white gown and hat—and yet more childlike—than she had looked yesterday in blue and scarlet. They sat for about five minutes in profound silence. Daphne, usually loquacious, felt as if she could not have spoken for the world. Martha was by nature stolid and inclined to dumbness. The stranger was watching Daphne’s face in a lazy reverie, thinking that his hurried sketch of yesterday was not half so lovely as the original, and yet it had seemed to him almost the prettiest head he had ever painted. ‘The provoking minx has hardly one good feature,’ he thought. ‘It is an utterly unpaintable beauty—a beauty of colour, life, and movement. Photograph her asleep, and she would be as plain as a pike-staff. How different from——’ He gave a faint sigh, and was startled from his musing by the door opening with a bang and an official calling out, ‘This way, ladies and gentlemen.’ They crossed the blazing courtyard in the wake of a brisk little gentleman in uniform, who led them up a flight of stone steps, and into a stony hall. Thence to the chapel, and then to an upper story, and over polished floors through long suites of rooms, everyone made more or less sacred by historical memories. Here was the table on which Napoleon the Great signed his abdication, while his Old Guard waited in the quadrangle below. Daphne looked first at the table and then out of the window, almost as if she expected to see that faithful soldiery drawn up in the stony courtyard—grim bearded men who had fought and conquered on so many a field, victors of Lodi and Arcola, Austerlitz and Jena, Friedland and Wagram, and who knew now that all was over and their leader’s star had gone down.