"Yes, I have the facts from the wife of our minister who presented Devota at Court. It appears that Lady Shirley's mother saw your friend on that occasion, and so startling was the girl's resemblance to her own lovely mother, that the dowager grandmother almost swooned at sight of her. Next day she wrote a most affectionate note imploring the young woman to come to her, and sent her carriage and maid to the hotel. The note was read and returned with this cruelly curt response: 'I am leaving London to-day. Permit me to say that the recognition withheld from my mother will never be accepted by her child.' Can you imagine the implacable, rancorous revenge that could so harshly reject overtures from an aged, white-haired grandmother? That girl has the wrought-iron will of Lady Shirley. Not long ago Horace Bingham told my son that when it was reported a young English nobleman--lacking money to repair his Elizabethan manor house--was trying to marry Miss Lindsay, Horace asked her when she would wear the ancestral diamonds his lordship offered her, and she replied icily: 'I do not buy my jewels from titled peddlers.' There! I hear the Bishop coughing and he needs his lozenges." As the door closed behind Mrs. Roscoe, her hostess laughed softly and murmured: "Dear old, pre-sanctified cat!" An exceedingly pretty woman, dowered with a kind and sunny nature, Mrs. Churchill was a devotedly tender wife and mother, loyally attached to her church, and undeniably fond of her card club, opera box and gay house-parties--the latter an unusually attractive feature of summer sojourns at her villa, "The Oleanders." Two hours later in the day, she sat before the oval mirror of her dressing-room, watching the nimble fingers of the maid pile her black hair into a towering pompadour, while Miss Lindsay leaned back in an easy chair close to the onyx toilet table. Behind the blue crest of a distant peak the sun had disappeared, but the vivid light of afterglow streamed through the open window framed in riotous clusters of _réve d'or_ roses; and beyond the eastern rock-bound shore line stretched a breeze-dimpled yellow sea, where sail boats swung like gigantic white butterflies over a wind-swept field of jonquils. "Mrs. Churchill, where are the children? As I must leave after an early cup of coffee in the morning, I should like to see as much as possible of them this evening." "All gone to a dog show in the village, and afterwards to a birthday tea at the Whiteheads'. I tried to buy off Rex, and offered sundry bribes, as he is rather too young yet; but he is such a persistent, wilful little sinner, and besides, the governess, seconded by Grace and Otto, stood security for his good behavior at the tea-party. There, Anice--my head is sufficiently like the tower of Babel! Get things ready for Miss Lindsay and shake out her dinner gown." The maid fastened a diamond crescent in her mistress's hair and withdrew. "Now, why must you hurry away on that first train?"