When Lord Saxonstowe was shown into the small drawing-room of this small house he marvelled at the cleverness and delicacy of the taste which could make so much use of limited dimensions. It was the daintiest and prettiest room he had ever seen, and though he himself had small inclinations to ease and luxury of any sort, he drank in the pleasantness of his surroundings with a distinct sense of personal gratification. The room was empty of human life when he entered it, but the marks of a personality were all over it, and the personality was neither masculine nor feminine--it was the personality of a neuter thing, and Saxonstowe dimly recognised that it meant Art. He began to understand something of Lucian as he looked about him, and to conceive him as a mind which dominated its enveloping body to a love of beauty that might easily degenerate into a slavedom to luxury. He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour. He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess--instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. He looked at her closely as she approached him, and he saw that the merry eyes had lost some of their roguery, but were still frank, clear, and kindly; some of the freckles had gone, but a good many were still there, adding piquancy to a face that had no pretensions to beauty, but many to the charms which spring from the possession of a kindly heart and a purposeful temperament. Good temper and good health appeared to radiate from Miss Chilverstone; the active girl of sixteen had developed into a splendid woman, and Lord Saxonstowe, as she moved towards him, admired her with a sudden recognition of her feminine strength--she was just the woman, he said to himself, who ought to be the mate of a strong man, a man of action and purpose and determination. She held out her hand to him with a frank smile. ‘Do you remember me?’ she said. ‘It is quite ten years since that fateful afternoon at Simonstower.’ ‘Was it fateful?’ he answered. ‘Yes, I remember quite well. In those days you were called Sprats.’ ‘I am still Sprats,’ she answered, with a laugh. ‘I shall always be Sprats. I am Sprats to Lucian and Haidee, and even to my children.’ ‘To your children?’ he said wonderingly. ‘I have twenty-five,’ she replied, smiling at his questioning look. ‘But of course you do not know. I have a private orphanage, all of my own, in Bayswater--it is my hobby. If you are interested in babies and children, do come to see me there, and I will introduce you to all my charges.’ ‘I will certainly do that,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it hard work?’