IT is somewhat more than a year and a half since Kenelm Chillingly left England, and the scene now is in London, during that earlier and more sociable season which precedes the Easter holidays,--season in which the charm of intellectual companionship is not yet withered away in the heated atmosphere of crowded rooms,--season in which parties are small, and conversation extends beyond the interchange of commonplace with one’s next neighbour at a dinner-table,--season in which you have a fair chance of finding your warmest friends not absorbed by the superior claims of their chilliest acquaintances. There was what is called a _conversazione_ at the house of one of those Whig noblemen who yet retain the graceful art of bringing agreeable people together, and collecting round them the true aristocracy, which combines letters and art and science with hereditary rank and political distinction,--that art which was the happy secret of the Lansdownes and Hollands of the last generation. Lord Beaumanoir was himself a genial, well-read man, a good judge of art, and a pleasant talker. He had a charming wife, devoted to him and to her children, but with enough love of general approbation to make herself as popular in the fashionable world as if she sought in its gayeties a refuge from the dulness of domestic life. Amongst the guests at the Beaumanoirs, this evening were two men, seated apart in a small room, and conversing familiarly. The one might be about fifty-four; he was tall, strongly built, but not corpulent, somewhat bald, with black eyebrows, dark eyes, bright and keen, mobile lips round which there played a shrewd and sometimes sarcastic smile.