"Hyacinthe King, the great actress, my dear: could anything be more delicious?" Lady Dering has been absent on the Continent during the season, and is utterly ignorant of all the _on dits_ of the day. "Charming!" murmurs Florence Ffolliott with the interested inflection of thorough good breeding; but her hands, lying clasped together on her lap, clasp each other cruelly. "Yes," continues her ladyship. "I knew her father in my young days--Ernest King--the Kings of Essex, you know?" Florence nods assent. "He was the handsomest fellow imaginable, married a lovely Greek girl; and here comes his daughter startling the world with her genius twenty odd years after my little flirtation with him. It makes one feel old, child--old. I called on her the last day I was in London, but she was out; so then I wrote and begged her to come to Stokeham when she could. Now I must leave you, dear. What are you reading? Poetry, of course. I never read anything else either when I was your age and was engaged to Sir Harry." The bright, stately lady laughs gayly as she goes, and Florence Ffolliott sits before her fire until luncheon-time, turning over a dozen wild fancies in her brain--fancies that do no honor either to the man she loves or the woman whom she cannot help disliking heartily. But her just, and withal generous, soul dismisses them at last, and she bows her head to the blow and acknowledges it to be what it is--an accident. That the advent of Hyacinthe King in their midst should have created no sensation among the party assembled at Stokeham would scarcely be a reasonable proposition: it did, and not only the excitement that the coming of a renowned meteor of the theatrical firmament might be expected to occasion in a house full of British subjects, but an undertone of surmise, and some sarcasms, between those--the majority--who were well enough aware of Roy Chandoce's peculiar infatuation for the beautiful young player. The pair were watched keenly, it must be confessed, but with a courtesy and _savoir faire_ that admitted no betrayal of this absolutely human curiosity--by none more keenly and more guardedly than by Lady Florence Ffolliott. Neither she nor they discovered aught in the conduct of either the man or the woman to find fault with or cavil at.