So, still dressed as she had left the _salon_, Olwen slipped quickly out of her room and down a sharply-angled corridor, passing as she went the old Frenchman with the red speck in his button-hole and the elder lady in mourning. Olwen glanced up at the numbers on the doors. ... "22," that was Mr. Awdas's room; she had overheard him telling Madame that he would remember _vingt-deux_ because it was his own age. "23," next to it on the right; that was Mrs. Cartwright's. Olwen hoped that she had not yet gone to bed. She tapped. "_Entrez!_" called Mrs. Cartwright's deep voice, rather absorbed. Olwen entered, to find the writer apparently ready for bed, but at work. Her green shaded lamp was alight on the table, where she sat with a pad before her. Her brown hair hung down in two plaits over a Persian robe of raw white silk, almost seamless, gold-girdled, and with stars and islands worked in gold thread; a relic of her time in the East. Another relic, perhaps, was the mingling of faint discreet scents that hung about the room: sandal-wood, orris, kuss-kuss, and rose. She looked up; then sprang to her feet as she saw Olwen Howel-Jones, still dressed as she had gone to bed some time before. "My dear----Anything wrong?" "No! No, thanks," said Olwen. Then involuntarily and surprised, "Oh, Mrs. Cartwright! how wonderful you look in that dressing-gown! Your arm, when the sleeve fell back, was like a little statue my Uncle's got in Liverpool, copied from the British Museum. A Tanagra, he calls it. You look exactly like that statue, you do really." "Do I?" returned Mrs. Cartwright, with a passing glance down her own long outlines from the shoulder to the narrow Turkish-slippered foot on the mat. It was no news to her that she possessed, even yet, some lines that sculptors centuries dead would have loved. Like many another plain-faced woman (as she was self-admitted) she had her special vanity. Her own pride of limb was as arrogant as it was secret. "My boys are going to inherit my absurdly long legs, I think," was all she said, lightly, smiling down into the vivid little face of the girl who had come in, and wondering what had brought her there so late. Olwen held it out, the Charm dangling at the end of its long ribbons. As she was hastening along the corrider she had wondered what excuse she could bring with it. Now she felt that it was unnecessary display, that invention of the Red Cross Charity Sale which she had palmed off upon poor Miss Walsh. The truth--or a small portion of it--seemed to blurt itself out to Mrs. Cartwright.