She leaned across the table, flushed, gaping a little in eagerness. “Well, and you found her!” She threw it straight at him. “Charlie, you _do_ know something!” “Flattered, Cicely; properly flattered.” His look was over her shoulder toward the windows. “One good turn deserves another,” he said. “Mrs. Essington is now hunting for us.” Cissy’s startled turn gave her, through the expanse of glass, the glimpse of a passing profile, pale against a parasol of rose. This fleeting profile had seemed to Thair rarely luminous, lighted with a delicate life of its own, an atmosphere excluding the crowd of them. But when she stood in the door he was startled. She was the sharpest, palest, unhappiest substance of the vision. That false radiance of hers was furled in her hand—just an arrangement of silk and sun! Poor dear! Cissy’s shot was, after all, nearer the mark. She did look “the worst of the lot.” -------------- Vibrating through her house with a roving eye to the agreeable disposition of her guests tucked away among remote book-shelves, and in angles of the veranda, Mrs. Budd had more than ever the air of a great, impulsive girl suddenly smitten with middle age, and trying to make the best of it. She was younger far than Florence Essington, younger than Cissy Fitz Hugh, younger even than her own daughter, whom she presently came upon, teasing the dachshunds on the grassplot beside the “glass room.” The girl was on her knees. Each separate thread of her gorgeous bush of hair glistening in the dazzle of the late morning sun, her flushing cheeks, her somber brows, her hot, bright eyes, were all a part of the ripple of color and motion she made in the dead, warm greenness. The two long, wriggling dogs threw themselves upon her with yelps and scramblings. She tossed them back, rolled them off their feet, tousled and worried them with gurgles of joy and foolish, tender mutterings. Her mother’s shadow, falling across her, brought up her eyes in a quick flash of recognition. “Oh, mama, the darlings! Look! The angels! See him snap! Do look—_now_, mama! Oh, you didn’t look quick enough!” Mrs. Budd’s eyes absently took in the encircling shrubbery, the walk to their right, thinly veiled with straggling fennel, and came back to her daughter’s lovely face with a sort of puzzled helplessness. “Yes, pettie, yes; they’re very nice. But _what_ a way to spend the morning!” Julia sat back on her heels. Her great brows, curved to a peak, spelled innocent interrogation. “For mercy’s sake, why _not_, mama?” “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Mrs. Budd began with a gush, trailing off dimly—“but with so many people about—people to be pleasant to—why shouldn’t you just—be pleasant?” “Pleasant? Am I _not_ pleasant, mama? To whom?” “Why, everybody, dearie; and—Mr. Thair!” “But I am pleasant to Charlie Thair, mama. I’m very, _very_ pleasant.”