It was not an apartment to be left alone in for long. No doubt the family of the owner, a younger brother of an Irish peer, found it pleasant and airy when they were down there in the summer, and the owner himself found the rent of it for the spring, autumn, and winter, a very hopeful source of income; but it bore "lodging-house" on every scrap of furniture throughout it. Sir Charles stared round at the bad engravings, at the bad old-fashioned artists on the walls; looked with concentrated interest on a plaster-model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and wondered whether the mortar shrinking had warped it; peeped into two or three books on the table; looked out of the window at the promenading invalids and the green twinkling sea; and was relieved beyond measure when he heard a woman's step on the staircase outside. The door opened, and a woman entered--but not Mrs. Hammond. A tall woman, with sallow cheeks and great eyes, and a thickish nose and large full lips, with a low forehead, over which tumbled waves of crisp brown hair, with a marvellous lithe figure and a peculiar swinging walk. Shifty in her glance, stealthy in her walk, cat-like in her motions, her face deadly pale,--a volcano crumbled into ashes, with no trace of its former fire save in her eyes,--a woman at once uncomfortable, uncanny, noticeable, and fearsome,--Miss Gillespie. The family of the younger brother of the Irish peer owning the house prided themselves immensely on certain pink-silk blinds to the windows, which happened at that moment to be down. There must have been some very peculiar effect in the tint thrown by those blinds to have caused Sir Charles Mitford to stare so hard at the new-comer, or to lose all trace of his ordinary colour as he gazed at her. She spoke first. Her full lips parted over a brilliant set of teeth as with a slight inclination she said, "I have the pleasure of addressing Sir Charles Mitford? Mrs. Hammond begs me to say that she is at present in attendance upon Mr. Hammond, who is forbidden to-day to leave his room; but she hopes to be with you in a very few minutes." A polite but sufficiently ordinary speech; certainly not in itself calculated to call forth Mitford's rejoinder--"In God's name, how did you come here?" "You still keep up that horrid habit of swearing! _Autre temps, autres moeurs_, as I teach my young lady from the French proverb-book. What was it you asked?" "How did you come here? what are you doing here?" "I came here through the medium of the Ladies' Association for Instructors, to whom I paid a registration-fee of five shillings. What am I doing here? Educating youth, and making myself generally useful. I am Miss Gillespie, of whom I know you have heard." "You have seen me before this, since--since the old days?"