Mrs. Freddy Tunbridge was a very popular person. It was agreed that nobody willingly missed one of her parties. There were those who said this was not so much because of her and Mr. Freddy, though they were eminently likeable people; not merely because you met 'everybody' there, and not even because of the excellence of their dinners. Notoriously this last fact fails to appeal very powerfully to the majority of women, and it is they, not men, who make the social reputation of the hostess. There was in this particular case a theory, held even by those who did not care especially about Mrs. Freddy, that hers was an 'amusing,' above all, perhaps, a 'becoming,' house. People had a pleasant consciousness of looking uncommon well in her pretty drawing-room. Others said it wasn't the room, it was the lighting, which certainly was most discerningly done--not dim, and yet so far from glaring that quite plain people enjoyed there a brief unwonted hour of good looks. Only a limited amount of electricity was used, and that little was carefully masked and modulated, while the two great chandeliers each of them held aloft a very forest of wax candles. It was known, too, that the spell was in no danger of being rudely broken. The same tender but festive radiance would bathe the hospitable board of the great oak dining-room below. And why were they not processing thither? 'Is it my sister who is late?' Miss Levering asked, turning her slim neck in that deliberate way of hers to look about the room. 'No; your sister is over there, talking to---- Oh--a----' Mrs. Freddy, having looked round to refresh her memory, was fain to slur over the fact that Mrs. Fox-Moore was in the corner by the pierced screen, not talking to any one, but, on the contrary, staring dark-visaged, gloomy, sibylline, at a leaflet advertising a charity concert, a document conspicuously left by Mrs. Freddy on a little table. On her way to rescue Mrs. Fox-Moore from her desert island of utter loneliness, Mrs. Freddy saw Sir William Haycroft, the newly-made Cabinet Minister, rather pointedly making his escape from a tall, keen-looking, handsome woman wearing eye-glasses and iron-grey hair dressed commandingly. Without a qualm Mrs. Freddy abandoned Mrs. Fox-Moore to prolonged exile, in order to soothe the ruffled minister. 'I think,' she said, pausing in front of the great man and delicately offering him an opportunity to make any predilection known--'I think you know every one here.' Haycroft muttered in his beard--but his eyes had lit upon the new face. 'Who's that?' he said; but his tone added, 'Not that it matters.' 'You don't know her? Well, that's a proof of how you've neglected your friends since the new Government came in. But you really mean it--that nobody has introduced you to Miss Levering yet? What _is_ Freddy thinking about!' 'Dinner!' replied a voice at her elbow with characteristic laconism, and Freddy Tunbridge pulled out his watch.