“Oh, she is not my fortune, Nan! I am too old a moth for that candle. The woman is like a conduit of red wine let loose in the garden of White Hall. She makes all but the abstemious—drunk. And the marvel is that she is just as magical with women, is Hortense. Ask my Lord Sussex how he likes the transfiguration of his wife.” “Castlemaine’s stupid brat!” “Little whey face all turned into dimples, roguery, and mischief. She twinkles round the Mancini like a little Mercury with feathers at her heels. I will speak with Hortense; she has some sort of sisterly good-will to me, and a kind of pride in making sulky people merry. She’ll set the girl’s blood spinning, or I’m a fool.” Anne Purcell leaned back in her chair as though tired. “Anything to get rid of that sour face. But it’s her mawkishness, her squeamy, ‘pray-with-me-or-I-shall-die’ look, that makes me doubtful.” The gentleman nodded understandingly. “Leave that to Hortense. The Italian has a veneer of softness; she is not like a Nell Gwyn. It is a question of subtleties. Nell would swear the girl into a fit in three minutes. The Mancini has a trick of seeming a saint—when necessary. If the Italian makes no romp out of her, then I will dub her nothing but a petticoated Hamlet.” My lady stretched her arms with a gesture of impatient ennui. “Well we can try. Let us forget the ghost to-night. I feel I must laugh, or I shall have wrinkles round my mouth.” “Nell shall do that for you. You will come in my coach?” “And the proprieties?” He laughed with the true sardonic gayety of the Restoration. “Sister Kate shall see to them. Though she is stone deaf she likes to see the dresses and the candles. There is one mistake that Mr. Milton made in that he did not tell us that the devil is deaf in one ear.” III Had Lady Purcell, herself unseen, followed her daughter to her room, she would have been astonished by the sudden transformation that swept over her so soon as the door closed. The apathetic figure straightened into keen aliveness; the look of vacuity vanished from the face. It was like a sudden transition from damp, listless November to the starlit brilliance of a frosty night. “Dust and ashes at two-and-twenty!” My Lord Gore’s echoing of Biblical pessimism seemed to have lost its appropriateness so far as Barbara Purcell was concerned. There was nothing listless about the intense and rather swarthy face that looked down into the garden with its white-pillared music-room and its October memories. It was more the face of some impassioned child of destiny striving to gaze into the mystery of the coming years.