“Indeed! Does then the wife of this miserable little wooden soldier think the granddaughter of a Maharajah unworthy to bear the light of her eyes? We will see, we will see. Perhaps she is a little too imperious; there may be powers in the earth greater than hers! I will write to my mother, who has never yet failed to fulfil my wishes, and I will tell her to search if she can find means to humble this proud lady of the fens, so that she may sue to me to receive me in her house, heathen, foreigner, though I am!” And with a superb gesture Nouna signified her contempt for the ironical laughter her husband could not restrain. “Oh, little empress,” he said, good-humouredly, “you will have to learn that all magicians have limits, and that even a mother so devoted as yours can’t carry out all the freaks that enter into one little feminine head. The very king of the black art could not move Lady Florencecourt!” “The king! Perhaps not, because he is a foolish male thing,” retorted Nouna coldly, “but what my mother wills to do she does, and I trust her.” And she would not suffer any further word on the subject. George was in the depths of his heart not without a little anxiety about this Norfolk visit. Unconventionality is so much more unconventional in the country, where every trifling detail in which a man differs from his neighbours is nodded over far and wide as a sign of mental aberration, while in the case of a woman it is held to warrant even graver doubts. Nouna herself was in the highest spirits at the prospect; delightful as life in London was, a change after five weeks of her new home was more delightful still. She had had made for the occasion a varied assortment of dainty white frocks, of the kind that charm men by their simplicity, and women by their costliness, and a white costume with fine lines of red and gold, for yachting on the broads, which might have carried off the palm at Cowes. Nouna had the instinct of dress, a regal instinct which revelled in combinations and contrasts, in forms and folds, which everyday English women might admire or marvel at, but copied at their peril. She travelled down, the day being cool, in a Spanish cloak of mouse-grey velvet, lined with ivory silk, and fastened with clasps of smoked pearl and silver. On her head she wore a cap of the same colours. The milliner, an artist spoiled by ministering to a long course of puppets, was aghast at the order, and suggested that it would make Mrs. Lauriston look, well--er--brown. Nouna replied, with a great sweep of the eyelashes, that she _was_ brown, and she should be sorry to look anything else. And indeed her beauty was seen to great advantage in this original setting, and its tints might pleasantly have suggested to the fanciful brown woods in the haze of a grey October day.