'Yes, miss.' 'At half-past five.' 'Yes, miss.' 'I specially don't want to be interrupted.' 'No, miss.' 'Not by _any_body, no matter whom.' 'Very well, miss.' A slight pause. 'Shall I show the gentleman into the drawing-room, miss?' 'It's not a gentleman, and I'll see her upstairs in my sitting-room.' 'Yes, miss. Very well, miss.' 'And don't forget--to _any_ one else I'm not at home.' 'No, miss. What name, miss?' Vida hesitated. The servants nowadays read everything. 'Oh, you can't make a mistake. She---- It will be a stranger--some one who has never been here before. Wait! I'll look out of the morning-room window. If it is the person I'm expecting, I'll ring the bell. You understand. If the morning-room bell has rung just as this person comes, it will be the one I'm expecting.' 'Yes, miss.' With a splendid impassivity in the face of precautions so unprecedented, the servant withdrew. Vida smiled to herself as she leaned back among the cushions of her capacious sofa, cutting the pages of a book. A pleasant place this room of hers, wide and cool, where the creamy background of wall and chintz-cover was lattice-laced with roses. The open windows looked out upon one of those glimpses of greenery made vivid to the London eye, not alone by gratitude, but by contrast of the leafage against the ebonized bark of smoke-ingrained bole and twig. The summer wind was making great, gentle fans of the plane branches; it was swaying the curtains that hung down in long, straight folds from the high cornices. No other sound in the room but the hard grate of the ivory paper-knife sawing its way through a book whose outside alone (a muddy-brown, pimpled cloth) proclaimed it utilitarian. Among the fair-covered Italian volumes, the vellum-bound poets, and those friends-for-a-lifetime wearing linen or morocco to suit a special taste; above all, among that greater company 'quite impudently French' that stood close ranked on shelves or lay about on tables--the brown book on its dusty modern theme wore the air of a frieze-coated yeoman sitting amongst broadcloth and silk. The reader glanced from time to time at the clock. When the small glittering hand on the porcelain face pointed to twenty minutes past five, the lady took her book and her paper-knife into a front room on the floor below. She sat down behind the lowered persienne, and every now and then lifted her eyes from the page and peered out between the tiny slits. As the time went on she looked out oftener. More than once she half rose and seemed about to abandon all hope of the mysterious visitor when a hansom dashed up to the door. One swift glance: 'They go in cabs!'--and Miss Levering ran to the bell.