Glancing up and down, and across the hospitable board, exquisitely arranged with the loveliest flowers and fruit, and the most priceless old silver, he noticed that every woman of the party was painted and powdered except Maryllia, and her young protegee, Cicely. The dining-room of Abbot's Manor was not a light apartment,- -its oak-panelled walls and raftered ceiling created shadow rather than luminance,--and though the windows were large and lofty, rising from the floor to the cornice, their topmost panes were of very old stained glass, so that the brightest sunshine only filtered, as it were, through the deeply-encrusted hues of rose and amber and amethyst squares, painted with the arms of the Vancourts, and heraldic emblems of bygone days. Grateful and beautiful indeed was this mysteriously softened light to the ladies round the table,--and for a brief space they almost LOVED Maryllia. For HER face was flushed, and quite uncooled by powder--'like a dairymaid's--she will get so coarse if she lives in the country always!' Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay confided softly to Lord Charlemont, who vaguely murmured-- 'Ah! Yes! I daresay!' quite without any idea of what the woman was talking about. Maryllia's pretty hair too was ruffled, she having merely taken off her hat in the hall on her return from church, without troubling to go up to her room and 'touch up' her appearance as all the other ladies who had suffered from walking exercise had done,--and her eyes looked just a trifle tired. Adderley found her charming with this shade of fatigue and listlessness upon her,--more charming than in her most radiant phases of vivacity. Her peach-like skin, warmed as it was by the sun, was tinted with Nature's own exquisite colouring, and compared most favourably with the cosmetic art so freely displayed by her female friends on either side of her. Julian began to con verses in his head, and he recalled the lines of seventeeth-century Eichard Crashaw:-- "A Face that's best By its own beauty drest, And can alone command the rest." And he caught himself wondering why,--whenever he came near the Lady of the Manor,--he was anxious to seem less artificial, less affected, and more of a man than his particular 'Omar Kayyam' set had taught him to be. The same praiseworthy desire moved him in the company of John Walden, therefore sex could have nothing to do with it. Was it 'Soul'?--that 'breath of God' which had been spoken of in the pulpit that morning?