A rush of strange memories had flooded back into her brain, dim and tantalizing, yet full of meaning. This was the brooch she remembered at the throat of the tall lady who had run to comfort her when she had fallen and cut her knees as a little child. How had Dan come by it? To whom had it belonged? XXX Jeffray had taken lodgings at Tunbridge Wells over a stationer’s shop, Peter Gladden, pompously indefatigable, having discharged all the petty preliminaries for his master. The windows of the parlor gave a slanting view of the Pantiles, and a broad glimpse of the common, gilded with gorse, its may-trees bursting into snow, the rocks sleeping like toads on the sunny slopes. The woods of Eridge bristled beyond, and Crowborough Beacon climbed purple into the south-western sky. The village with its biblically-named hills seemed gay with spruce gentlemen, beflowered ladies, lackeys, and such gaudy beetles. The frivolous little Sybaris nestled amid the dazzling freshness of spring, orchards still white upon the slopes, flowers thick in every meadow. It was a dewy morning after rain, the landscape a-shimmer in the sun when Peter Gladden shaved and valeted his master, and prepared him for a parade upon the Pantiles and the public walks where he might study the life of the place. Jeffray, who still wore black and dressed without great respect to fashion, discovered himself scrutinized with some closeness by the smart idlers whose lives appeared consecrated to studying the shape of a buckle or the cock of a hat. Jeffray sat down on a seat in the public walk and watched the people go to and fro. A strutting, waddling crowd it was, picturesque at a distance, with its brocades and colors, but, like a bold and splashing picture, disclosing its artifices and its flaws to the close observer. The men, with a few signal exceptions, appeared to belong to that indefinable order of beings who combined the semi-sentimental spirit of libertinism with the coarse arrogance of an aristrocratic animal. What thrusting out of elbows was there; what delicate dabbings of the nose with lace; what strutting and smirking; what showing off of legs and gesturings with white ruffled hands! It was a clever crowd, too, with the exception of a few clumsy squires who lumbered through it, and the open-mouthed toadies gaping and ready like stupid codfish for “my lord’s joke.” Shallow and superficial seemed the gay, epigrammatic philosophy of such people. Jeffray felt that fashion was justified of her children, and that even the pageantry of life could not make such mumming bearable. At three o’clock Jeffray dined at a quiet “ordinary” preparatory to paying a state call on the Lady Letitia. He took his meal in a little white-fronted inn whose casements opened on trim lawns, fruit-trees, and white palings. The beds cut in the grass were bright with pansies, stocks, and arabis. A broad brick path led up to the trellised porch.