"I should think I do remember Lady Jenkins," laughed Shuttleworth. "How is she? Flourishing about the streets as usual in that red-wheeled carriage of hers, dazzling as the rising sun?" "Lady Jenkins is not well," replied Tamlyn, gravely. "She gives me some concern." "In what way does she give you concern?" "Chiefly because I can't find out what it is that's amiss with her?" "Has she been ill long?" "For some months now. She is not very ill: goes out in her carriage to dazzle the town, as you observe, and has her regular soirées at home. But I don't like her symptoms: I don't understand them, and they grow worse. She has never been well, really well, since that French journey." "What French journey?" "At the end of last summer, my Lady Jenkins must needs get it into her head that she should like to see Paris. Stupid old thing, to go all the way to France for the first time in her life! She did go, taking Mina Knox with her--who is growing up as pretty a girl as you'd wish to see. And, by the way, Shuttleworth, Mina is in luck. She has had a fortune left her. An old gentleman, not related to them at all, except that he was Mina's godfather, left her seven thousand pounds last year in his will. Arnold is trustee." "I am glad of it. Little Mina and I used to be great friends. Her mother is as disagreeable as ever, I suppose?" "As if she'd ever change from being _that_!" returned Tamlyn. "I have no patience with her. She fritters away her own income, and then comes here and worries Arnold's life out with her embarrassments. He does for her more than I should do. Educates young Dicky, for one thing." "No doubt. Knox always had a soft place in his heart. But about Lady Jenkins?" "Lady Jenkins went over to Paris with her maid, taking Mina as her companion. It was in August. They stayed three weeks there, racketing about to all kinds of show-places, and overdoing it, of course. When they arrived at Boulogne on their way back, expecting to cross over at once, they found they had to wait. A gale was raging, and the boats could not get out. So they put up at an hotel there; and, that night, Lady Jenkins was taken alarmingly ill--the journey and the racketing and the French living had been too much for her. Young people can stand these things, Johnny Ludlow; old ones can't," added Tamlyn, looking at me across the hearth. "Very true, sir. How old is Lady Jenkins?" "Just seventy. But you wouldn't have thought her so much before that French journey. Until then she was a lively, active, bustling woman, with a good-natured, pleasant word for every one. Now she is weary, dull, inanimate; seems to be, half her time, in a sort of lethargy." "What was the nature of the illness?" asked Shuttleworth. "A seizure?"