"Please do. We neither of us mind, do we, Winnie?" said Mrs. Lenoir. There was really more reason to ask the General if he minded Winnie's cigarette, which had come from the studio and was not of a very fine aroma. Winnie stuck to her stool and listened, with her eyes set on the fire. At first the talk ran still on the three sons--evidently the old soldier's life was wrapped up in them--but presently the friends drifted back to old days, to the people they had both known. Winnie's ears caught names that were familiar to her, references to men and stories about men whom she had often heard Cyril Maxon and his legal guests mention. But to-night she obtained a new view of them. It was not their public achievements which occupied and amused the General and Mrs. Lenoir. They had known them as intimates, and delighted now to recall their ways, their foibles, how they had got into scrapes and got out of them in the merry thoughtless days of youth. Between them they seemed to have known almost everybody who was 'in the swim' from thirty years to a quarter of a century before; if the General happened to say, 'So they told me, I never met him myself,' Mrs. Lenoir always said, 'Oh, I did'--and _vice versâ_. "It was just before my dear wife died," the General said once, in dating a reminiscence. There was a moment's silence. Winnie did not look up. Then the General resumed his story. But he cut it rather short, and ended with, "I'm afraid our yarns must be boring this young lady, Clara." Evidently he accepted Winnie entirely at her face value--as Miss Winnie Wilson. The anecdotes and reminiscences, though intimate, had been rigidly decorous, even improbably so in one or two cases; and now he was afraid that she was bored with what would certainly interest any intelligent woman of the world. Winnie was amused, yet vexed, and inclined to wish she had not become Miss Wilson. But she had made a good impression; that was clear from the General's words when he took his leave. "Bertie will come and see you directly he gets home, Clara. It'll be in about six weeks, I expect." He turned to Winnie. "I hope you'll be kind to my boy. He doesn't know many ladies in London, and I want him to have a pleasant holiday." "I will. And I wish they were all three coming, Sir Hugh." "That might end in a family quarrel," he said, with a courtly little bow and a glance from his eyes, which had not lost their power of seconding a compliment. "Well, I think you've made a favourable impression, though you didn't say much," Mrs. Lenoir remarked when he was gone. Winnie was standing, with one foot on her stool now. She frowned a little. "I wish you'd tell him about me," she said. There was a pause; Mrs. Lenoir was dispassionately considering the suggestion. "I don't see much use in taking an assumed name, if you're going to tell everybody you meet." "He's such a friend of yours."