Lady Sellingworth had never given the maid any confidence about her secret reasons for doing this or that. But Cecile was a Parisian. She fully understood the reason for their visit to Geneva. Miladi had fallen in love. Lady Sellingworth’s excitement increased as she drove towards Coombe. It was complicated by a feeling of shyness. To herself she said that she was like an old debutante. She had been out of the world for so long, and now she was venturing once more among the merciless women of the world that never rests from amusing itself, from watching the lives of others, from gossiping about them, from laughing at them. She had been a leader of this world until she had denied it, had shut herself away from it. And now she was venturing back--because of a man. As she drove on swiftly through the wintry and dull-looking streets, streets that seemed to grow meaner, more dingy, more joyless, as she drew near to the outskirts of London, she looked back over the past. And she saw always the same reason for the important actions of her life. All of them had been committed because of a man. And now, even at sixty--Presently she saw by the look of the landscape that she was nearing Coombe, and she drew a little mirror out of her muff and gazed into it anxiously. “What will they say? What will he think? What will happen to me to-day?” The car turned into a big gravel sweep between tall, red-brick walls, and drew up before Mrs. Ackroyde’s door. In the long drawing-room, with its four windows opening on to a terrace, from which Coombe Woods could be seen sunk in the misty winter, Lady Sellingworth found many cheerful people whom she knew. Mrs. Ackroyde gave her blunt, but kindly, greeting, with her strange eyes, fierce and remote, yet notably honest, taking in at a glance the results of Geneva. Lady Wrackley was there in an astonishing black hat trimmed with bird of paradise plumes. Glancing about her while she still spoke to Dindie Ackroyde carelessly, Lady Sellingworth saw young Leving; Sir Robert Syng; the Duchess of Wellingborough, shaking her broad shoulders and tossing up her big chin as she laughed at some joke; Jennie Farringdon, with her puffy pale cheeks and parrot-like nose, talking to old Hubert Mostine, the man of innumerable weddings, funerals and charity fetes, with his blinking eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a large and gossiping mouth; Magdalen Dearing, whose Mona Lisa smile had attracted three generations of men, and who had managed to look sad and be riotous for at least four decades; Francis Braybrooke, pulling at his beard; Mrs. Birchington; Lady Anne Smith, wiry, cock-nosed, brown, ugly, but supremely smart and self-assured; Eve Colton, painted like a wall, and leaning, with an old hand blazing with jewels, on a stick with a jade handle; Mrs. Dews, the witty actress, with her white, mobile face, and the large irresponsible eyes which laughed at herself, the critics and