She smiled languidly, drawing away her hand and moving to a seat. "You know I am getting old enough to like to be told I am young, Sibley," was her answer. "Sit down, and tell me what has happened in the month that I've been in Washington." "Nothing can happen while you are away," he responded, with a smile. "We only vegetate, and wait for your return. You don't mind if I smoke?" "Certainly not. How is Mrs. Langdon?" He drew out a cigarette-case of tortoise-shell and gold, helped himself to a cigarette, and lighted it before he answered. "Mrs. Langdon is as usual," he replied. "She is as ill and as pious as ever." "For which is she to be pitied the more?" "Oh, I don't know that she is to be pitied for either," Langdon responded, in his crisp, well-bred voice. "Both her illness and her piety are in the nature of occupations to her. One must do something, you know." Mrs. Neligage offered no reply to this, and for half a moment the caller smoked in silence. "Tell me about yourself," he said. "You cruelly refuse to write to me, so that when you are away I am always in the dark as to what you are doing. I've no doubt you had all Washington at your feet." "Oh, there were a few unimportant exceptions," Mrs. Neligage returned, her voice a little hard. "I don't think that if you went on now you'd find the capital draped in mourning over my departure." Langdon knocked the ashes from his cigarette with the deliberation which marked all his movements. Then he looked at his hostess curiously. "You don't seem to be in the best of spirits this morning, Louise," he said. "Has anything gone wrong?" She looked at him with contracting brows, and ignored his question as she demanded abruptly:-- "What did you come to say to me?" "To say to you, my dear? I came as usual to say how much I admire you, of course." She made an impatient gesture. "What did you come to say?" she repeated. "Do you think I don't know you well enough to see when you have some especial purpose in mind?" Sibley Langdon laughed lightly,--a sort of inward, well-bred laugh,--and again with care trimmed his cigarette. "You are a person of remarkable penetration, and it is evidently of no use to hope to get ahead of you. I really came for the pleasure of seeing you, but now that I am here I may as well mention that I have decided to go abroad almost at once." "Ah," Mrs. Neligage commented. "Does Mrs. Langdon go with you?" He laughed outright, as if the question struck him as unusually droll. "You really cannot think me so selfish as to insist upon her risking her fragile health by an ocean voyage just for my pleasure." "I suspected that you meant to go alone," she said dryly. "But, my dear child," he answered with no change of manner, "I don't mean to go alone." She changed color, but she did not pursue the subject. She took up from the table a little Japanese ivory carving, and began to examine it with close scrutiny.