From Euston one must positively take a taxi in order to arrive at Dover Street. Mrs. Mynors instructed the driver to throw back the hood; and reclined, her sunshade between her delicate face and the June sun, enjoying a few minutes of the kind of pleasure in which she revelled. Ah! the joy of it. The gay streets, the well-dressed crowds, the enticing shops, the loaded flower-baskets, at the street corners, the window-boxes in the tall houses, the flashing cars, the bustle and movement of London in the season. Here, she felt, was her native element. To this she belonged--she whom a cruel fate had treated so ill as to cause the whole structure of her pleasure to crumble to nothing at the very time of life when a woman begins to feel that she needs comforts and luxury. For forty years she had enjoyed that empire which any beautiful woman may enjoy if she chooses. Her beauty had prevented every one who came near her from realising the truth about her. Had you told her that she was a monster of selfishness, that she had never loved anybody but herself, that she had jilted a poor man to marry a rich one, and that she had loved neither the one nor the other, she would simply have wondered how your mind could have become so warped as to cause you to utter such slanders. Now that she had the twofold weapons of beauty and misfortune, surely none could resist. Not for long years had her heart so throbbed, her blood run so swiftly, as this morning, as the taxi turned out of Bond Street, slid along Grafton Street into Dover Street, and stopped at the doors of the club. Since her husband's death she had never entered it. Now she wondered how she had kept away so long, and admired with fervour her own Spartan heroism. How meekly she had bowed under undeserved adversity! She strolled into the dressing-room, put down her sun-shade, and contemplated herself in a mirror. The things she had seen in the shops that morning, and the costumes in the streets, had put her somewhat out of conceit of her own appearance. The mirror, however, restored all her self-confidence. She was looking lovely, with a bloom in her cheeks that the fagged-looking London women could not hope to emulate. She used her powder with judgment and restraint, adjusted her veil, and went out into the hall. "I am going into the chintz parlour," said she to the page-boy, "and I am expecting a gentleman by appointment. Bring him to me there--Mrs. Mynors." She went upstairs, outwardly quite tranquil, though inwardly she was shaken with a storm of excitement which she could not wholly understand. In old days she had feared Osbert Gaunt. She remembered that, though she did not own it to herself. Devoted slave as he had been, she had had perhaps some faint instinctive premonition that he was in reality her master. He had been subject to bursts of passion, to fits of sullen rage. It had been exciting, but exhausting, to be loved by him. All that was twenty years ago. What was he now?