Susan Amphlett was Susie, or Lady Susie, for everybody who knew her socially; and for a good many people who had never seen her little _minois chiffoné_ nearer than in a photograph. People who spelled over the society papers in their snug suburban drawing-rooms, and loved to follow the flight of those migratory birds, the Mr. and Mrs. Willies and Jimmies, and Lady Bettys and Lord Tommys, who were always flitting from branch to branch, in the only world that seemed worth living in, when one read the Society papers--those shining-surfaced, richly-illustrated sixpennies, which brought the flavour of that other world across the muffin dishes and savoury sandwiches of suburban tea-tables. Mr. Amphlett was something in the City! Or that was his description when people wanted to describe him. He was briefly described as "rolling," and yet a pauper, if you weighed him against that mountain of gold, Mario Provana, the international money-dealer. "If ever Provana goes under, half Europe will have to go under with him," Susie's cousin, Claude Rutherford, ex-guardsman, ex-traveller, ex-artist, ex-lion-shooter, said, when he discussed the great financier with inquisitive outsiders. Claude was in the Portland Place drawing-room this afternoon, lounging against the mantelpiece, near the lamp-lit tea-tables, at one of which Madame Provana presided, his tall, slender figure half lost in a deepening gloom, above that island of bright light made by the lamps on the tea-table. It was easy for Claude to be lost in shadow, since there was so little of him to lose. Euclid's definition of a line, length without breadth, was his description; but his slender figure was a line that showed race in every inch. His scientific acquaintance called him a crystallisation. "Everything that was ever in the Disbrowes and the Rutherfords, good or bad, he has in its quintessence," the poet Eustace Lyon said of him. "Whatever the worst of the Rutherfords or the Disbrowes, from King Stephen downwards, ever did, Claude is capable of doing. Whatever the best of them ever accomplished he could do, if he had a mind to." * * * * *