Mrs. Travers was not many years younger than her husband; and yet she did not look old, although her health was far from good, her more youthful appearance being due to a false front of glossy chestnut-coloured hair, an occasional visit to the rouge-pot, and other artificial means used by civilised ladies to mitigate the ravages of time. In other things also she offered a striking contrast to her husband, being short and stout, or fat; she was also a dressy dame, and burdened her podgy fingers and broad bosom with too much gold and too many precious stones--yellow, blue, and red; and her silk dresses were also too bright-hued for a lady of her years and figure. Her favourite strong blues and purples would have struck painfully on the refined colour-sense of an aesthete. On the other hand, to balance these pardonable defects, she was kind-hearted; not at all artificial in her manner and conversation, or unduly puffed up with her position, as one might have expected her to be from her appearance; and, to put her chief merit last, she reverenced her husband, and believed that in all things--except, perhaps, in those small matters sacred to femininity, which concerned her personal adornment--“he knew best.” She was consequently prepared to extend a warm welcome to her young visitor, and, for her husband's sake, to do as much to make her visit pleasant as if she had been the lawful daughter of her husband's late friend and client, Colonel Eden. Nevertheless, after the days she had spent with Mary, Fan did not find Mrs. Travers' society exhilarating. The lady had given up walking, except a very little in the garden, but on most days she went out for carriage exercise in the morning, after Mr. Travers had gone to town. At two o'clock the ladies would lunch, after which Fan would be alone until the five o'clock tea, when her hostess would reappear in a gay dress, and a lovely carmine bloom on her cheeks--the result of her refreshing noonday slumbers. After tea they would spend an hour together in the garden talking and reading. Mrs. Travers, having bad eyesight, accepted Fan's offer to read to her. She read nothing but periodicals--short social sketches, smart paragraphs, jokes, and occasionally a tale, if very short, so that Fan found her task a very light one. She had _The World, Truth, The Whitehall Review, The Queen_ and _The Lady's Pictorial_ every week; and in the last-named paper Fan read out a little sketch--one of a series called “Eastern Idylls”--which she liked better than anything else for its graceful style and delicate pathos. So much did it please her, that she looked up the back numbers of the paper, and read all the sketches in them, each relating some little domestic East End incident or tale, pathetic or humorous, or both, with scenes and characters lightly drawn, yet with such skilful touches, and put so clearly before the mind, that it was impossible not to believe that these pictures were from life.