When Frothingham was beside Cecilia in the drawing room she said: “Would you like to go to Mrs. Ramsay?” “Yes--will you take me?” he replied. “I’ll write to-night making an appointment for Wednesday.” He was liking her immensely now, and, while he believed--not nearly so vividly as at first--in her connections with the other world, he felt growing confidence that they would rapidly fade before reawakening interest in this world. Meanwhile, he reasoned, his cue was to ingratiate himself by sympathising with her and encouraging her to closer and closer confidence. “It’s only a step from best friend to lover,” he said to himself. And he made admirable use of the two days between her tentative acceptance of him and their visit to Mrs. Ramsay. He was justly proud of his manner toward her--a little of the brother, a great deal of the best friend, the tenderness and sympathy of the lover, yet nothing that could alarm her. Mrs. Ramsay lived in an old brick cottage in a quiet street near Louisburg Square. In the two days Frothingham had become somewhat better acquainted with Henrietta Gillett and had got a strong respect for her intelligence. As he and Cecilia entered the dark little parlour he remembered what Henrietta had said about Mrs. Ramsay, and was on guard. The first impression he received was of a perfume, unmistakably of the heaviest, most suspicious Oriental kind. “Gad!” he said to himself, “that scent don’t suggest spirits. It smells tremendously of the world, the flesh, and the devil, especially the devil.” As his eyes became accustomed to the faint light he discovered the radiating centre of this odour--a small blackish woman of forty or thereabouts, with keen shifty black eyes and a long face as hard and fleshless from the cheekbones down as from the cheekbones up. The mouth was wide and cold and cruel. She was dressed in a loose black woollen wrapper, tight at the wrists, and her scanty black hair was in a careless oily coil low on the back of her head. Her eyelids lifted languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand--a pretty hand, slender and sensitive. “Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is it not?” At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started--Cecilia because it was another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at Mrs. Ramsay again. But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow was here for two hours--he left not twenty minutes ago. I am _so_ exhausted!” “Perhaps we would better come to-morrow,” said Cecilia, appeal, apology, and disappointment in her voice. “No--no,” replied Mrs. Ramsay wearily. “Dr. Yarrow tells me he has never known me to be so thoroughly under control as to-day. And”--she smiled faintly at Cecilia--“you know I would do anything for _you_.”