It very well may be, meantime, that he was reciprocally busy with her, taking her in, admiring her, this big, jolly, comely, high-mannered old woman, all in soft silks and drooping laces, who had driven into his solitude from Heaven knew where, and was quite unquestionably Someone, Heaven knew who. She had a moment of abstraction; but now, emerging from it, she used her eyeglass as a pointer, and indicatively swept the circle of painted eavesdroppers. "They make one feel like their grandmother, their youth is so flagrant," she sighed, "these grandmothers of the Quattrocento. Ah, well, we can only be old once, and we should take advantage of the privileges of age while we have 'em. Old people, I am thankful to say, are allowed, amongst other things, to be inquisitive. I'm brazenly so. Now, if one of our common acquaintances were at hand--for with England still mercifully small, we're sure to possess a dozen, you and I--what do you think is the question I should ask him?--I should ask him," she avowed, with a pretty effect of hesitation, and a smile that went as an advance-guard to disarm resentment, "to tell me who you are, and all about you--and to introduce you to me." "Oh," cried the young man, laughing. He laughed for a second or two. In the end, pleasantly, with a bow, "My name," he said, "if you can possibly care to know, is Blanchemain." His visitor caught her breath. She sat up straight, and gazed hard at him. "Blanchemain?" she gasped. VII There were, to be sure, reasons and to spare why the name should make her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman: dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively, furthermore, she would seek to extract from such a situation all the fun it promised. Taken off her guard, for the span of ten heart-beats she sat up straight and stared; but with the eleventh her attitude relaxed. She had regained her outward nonchalance, and resolved upon her system of fence. "Ah," she said, on a tone judiciously compounded of feminine artlessness and of forthright British candour, and with a play of the eyebrows that attributed her momentary suscitation to the workings of memory, "of course--Blanchemain. The Sussex Blanchemains. I expect there's only one family of the name?" "I've never heard of another," assented the young man. "The Ventmere Blanchemains," she pursued pensively. "Lord Blanchemain of Ventmere is your titled head?" "Exactly," said he. "I knew the late Lord Blanchemain--I knew him fairly well," she mentioned, always with a certain pensiveness. "Oh--?" said he, politely interested.