Mr. Amberley turned to a girl upon his left who had been taken in by Dickson Ingworth and who had been carrying on a laughing conversation with him during dinner. She was a pretty girl, a friend of his daughter Muriel. He liked pretty girls, and he smiled half paternally, half gallantly at her. "Won't you have another cigarette, Miss Wallace?" he said, pushing a silver box towards her. "They are supposed to be rather wonderful. My cousin Eustace Amberley is in the Egyptian Army and an aide-de-camp to the Khedive. The Khedive receives the officers every month and every one takes away a box of five hundred when they leave the palace--His Highness' own peculiar brand. These are some of them, which Eustace sent me." "May I?" she answered, a rounded, white arm stretched out to the box. "They certainly are wonderful. I have to be content with Virginian at home. I buy fifty at a time, and a tin costs one and threepence." She lit it delicately from the little methyl lamp he passed her, and the big man's kind eyes rested on her with appreciation. She was, he thought, very like a Madonna of Donatello, which he had seen and liked in Florence. The abundant hair was a dark nut-brown, almost chocolate in certain lights. The eyes were brown also, the complexion the true Italian morbidezza, pale, but not pallid, like a furled magnolia bud. And the girl's mouth was charming--"delicious" was the word in the mind of this connoisseur. It was as clear-cut as that of a girl's face in a Grecian frieze of honey-coloured travertine, there was a serene sweetness about it. But when she smiled the whole face was changed. The young brown eyes lit up and visited others with their own, as a bee visits flowers. The smile was radiant and had a conscious provocation in it. The paleness of the cheeks showed such tints of pearl and rose that they seemed carved from the under surface of a sea-shell. And, as Amberley looked, wishing that he had talked more to her during dinner, startled suddenly to discover such loveliness, he saw her lips suddenly glow out into colour in an extraordinary way. It wasn't scarlet--unpainted lips are never really that--but of the veiled blood-colour that is warm and throbs with life; a colour that hardly any of the names we give to pigment can properly describe or fix. What did he know about her? he asked himself as she was lighting her second cigarette. Hardly anything! She was a girl friend of his daughter's--they had been to the same school together at Bath--an orphan he thought, without any people. She earned her own living--assistant Librarian, he remembered, at old Podley's library. Yes, Podley the millionaire nonconformist who was always endowing and inventing fads! And Muriel had told him that she wrote a little, short stories in some of the women's papers. . . .