The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American. The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the hour. “I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips. “He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow, and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare the time—good-bye.” He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets, wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in London. Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind, and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange, lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise. This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened, glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child. The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall, slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of thirty, pushed her way to the front. “Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?” Cynthia nodded shortly. “Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she said.