“Come, be off. Don’t talk nonsense. You have no time to lose. Don’t let me see that face at dinner--you look as if Melancholy had marked you for her own. Away with you,” cried Mrs. Mayhew, playfully pushing her out of the room. Parker was amazed to hear her lady say: “Get me out my white silk and gauze dinner-dress, please, as quickly as possible, and run down to the pleasure-grounds, and bring me a bunch of crimson roses.” Twenty minutes later Alice appeared in the drawing-room, where she was the cynosure of all eyes except her husband’s; he merely swept her face with one cold glance, and resumed his conversation with Geoffrey. She wore a long and exquisitely-made square-cut white silk, with a bunch of red roses in her bosom. A piece of black velvet was fastened at her throat by a diamond star, with solitaires in her ears to correspond. Dinner went off much more cheerfully than on the previous day. Alice and Geoffrey seemed to have forgotten their feud and fallen into their old ways; their gay repartees and small jokes provoked general amusement. Alice caught her husband’s eyes fixed on her more than once in grave, puzzled amazement. In the drawing-room, Alice went unasked to the piano and sang two songs, “Rest on your battle-fields, ye brave,” and “The Rhine Maiden.” She sang the former with such intense pathos and feeling that Mrs. Mayhew and Mary were on the very verge of tears. Her pure, deliciously sympathetic voice called forth pleasure on every face except the one on which she wished to see it reflected. Her husband continued his occupation of pulling Tory’s ears as unconcernedly as if there was not a note of music within ten miles. After a time a round game was proposed. “Come along, Alice,” said Geoffrey, “and help me to count the markers,” emptying, as he spoke, a basketful of mother-o’-pearl fish on the crimson cloth. As she stood beside the table in the full light of the lamp, busily reckoning dozens of counters, her husband realised how lovely she was--lovelier than ever, as Helen had said. What could surpass the exquisite symmetry of her slender figure, her delicately-chiselled profile, or the graceful poise of her haughty little head? What her face had lost in its perpetual ripple of smiles it had more than gained in expression. She had grown, too, he discovered, at least an inch; her head was far above Geoffrey’s shoulder. How young and girlish she looked, not more than nineteen at the outside! _Who_ would believe that she was the mother of that great boy upstairs? It seemed absurd. How well he knew her half-foreign tricks and gesticulations with her pretty taper hands, as she indignantly accused Geoffrey of purloining a dozen counters more than his share. Would anyone think, as they looked at her standing there, that she was utterly without heart, as cold and callous as a block of marble, a miracle of obstinacy, and unreasonable beyond belief?