Mrs. Gilderman, though she had not recovered from her confinement with the rapidity that a washerwoman might have done under the same circumstances, was, nevertheless, so nearly quite well by the end of the month as to be able to be down-stairs and about the house. She did not go much abroad. Maybe on a fine afternoon she would take a spin in the park in the automobile or out along the river, but she did not go shopping, and was yet watched by her nurse with the jealous care due to a convalescent patient of such pre-eminent importance. But, though she did not go abroad, her friends came to see her, and she often held receptions in her own room with tea and wafers, maybe, and a babble of feminine chatter. She was conscious that her imported blue tea-gown was vastly becoming to her blond beauty, and she made the most of it, lying back in a nest of blue silk, silver-embroidered cushions. It was about this time that she made Gilderman promise to have his portrait painted. "I want Reginald to have it to say," she said, "that that is the way my father looked in the year that I was born." So Gilderman had commissioned Norcott to paint a full-length portrait of himself with a bit of realistic background showing a glimpse of the famous Cyprian Adonis fragment. No one living could do those little realistic bits of background as could Norcott. During this same month the Biddington-De Vaux wedding was to come off at the national capital--Arabella Stewart Biddington and Lord George De Vaux, an _attaché_ to a foreign embassy. Gilderman, on the score of relationship to Miss Biddington, had, of course, to go. That same day he was also to give a sitting to Norcott. He was growing very tired of these sittings. There had been a great many of them, for Norcott was endeavoring to make the work a _chef-d'oeuvre_. At first Gilderman had been very much interested in the artist, his surroundings, and the studio in which he worked. Not only had Norcott much to say for himself, but he had collected about him an enormous amount of bric-à-brac, rugs, tapestries, and hangings. You would have pronounced the anteroom to the studio to have been cluttered were the things gathered there less fine and interesting than they were. The studio itself was a great, high-ceilinged room with a big skylight. There was more bric-à-brac, rugs, tapestries here, but in the wider spaces they did not seem so crowded together as in the anteroom. Gilderman had become pretty well acquainted with all these surroundings by now, and they were no longer so interesting to him as they had been at first. He sat there in the morning of the Biddington-De Vaux wedding feeling rather bored. He had to take the trip to the capital in the afternoon, too. That also was a bore in prospect.