Maradick looked down on the ground. He knew quite well that he would have done whatever Lady Gale had asked him to do. She had seemed to him since he had first seen her something very beautiful and even wonderful, and he felt proud and grateful that she had trusted him like that. “It’s very good of you, Lady Gale,” he said; “I will certainly be a friend of Tony’s, if that is what you want me to do. He is a delightful fellow, much too delightful, I am afraid, to have anything much to do with a dull, middle-aged duffer like myself. I must wake up and shake some of the dust off.” She smiled. “Thank you; you don’t know how grateful I am to you for taking an interest in him. I shall feel ever so much safer.” And then the door opened and Tony came in. He crossed over to her and said eagerly, “Mother, the Lesters are here. Came this afternoon. They’re coming up in a minute; isn’t it splendid!” “Oh, I am glad—not too loud, Tony, you’ll disturb the bridge. How splendid they’re coming; Mildred said something in town about possibly coming down in the car.” “He’s the author-fellow, you know,” said Tony, turning round to Maradick. “You were reading ‘To Paradise’ yesterday; I saw you with it. His books are better than himself. But she’s simply ripping; the best fun you ever saw in your life.” That Maradick should feel any interest in meeting a novelist was a new experience. He had formerly considered them, as a class, untidy both in morals and dress, and had decidedly preferred City men. But he liked the book. “Yes. I was reading ‘To Paradise this afternoon,’ he said. “It’s very good. I don’t read novels much, and it’s very seldom that I read a new one, but there was something unusual——” Then the door opened and the Lesters came in. She was not pretty exactly, but striking—even, perhaps, he thought afterwards, exciting. He often tried on later days to call back the first impression that he had had of her, but he knew that it had not been indifference. In the shaded half-lights of the room, the grey blue shadows that the curtains flung on to the dark green carpet made her dress of light yellow stand out vividly; it had the color of primroses against the soft, uncertain outlines of the walls and hidden corners. There was a large black hat that hid her face and forehead, but beneath it there shone and sparkled two dark eyes that flung the heightened colour of her cheeks into relief. But the impression that he had was something most brilliantly alive; not alive in quite Tony’s way—that was a vitality as natural as the force of streams and torrents and infinite seas; this had something of opposition in it, as though some battle had created it. Her husband, a dark, plain man, a little tired and perhaps a little indifferent, was in the background. He did not seem to count at the moment.