"Oh, yes; they have been coming in all the afternoon. I think that it will be very pleasant when we get well shaken together. You see your old friend, Sir John Dacre, over there, do you not? away over at the end of the other rooms. The fine-looking girl to whom he is talking is Richard Lincoln's daughter." Geoffrey looked in the direction, and saw the back of Sir John Dacre's head as he bent over to speak to Miss Lincoln. He made a little start to go over to greet his friend. Miss Windsor saw it, and said: "You will see Sir John after dinner, Lord Brompton; you would interrupt a pleasant conversation now by being that wretched third who makes a 'company' a crowd; and at the same time, you would destroy all the proportion of the party by leaving me alone. You must sit on the sofa here by my side, and I will point out all the people to you. You will not sit anywhere near me, you know, at dinner, as you will take in Mrs. Oswald Carey, as I told you this morning." Geoffrey sat down on the sofa by her and looked about the room. "I do not see the great professional beauty in this room, Miss Windsor," he said, after he had finished his inspection of the people present, who seemed plunged in the depths of that gloom which always hangs over a party before a dinner. Richard Lincoln, who had been touched by her Grace's melancholy, stood talking to her. In the opposite corner of the room sat Mr. James Sydney, the celebrated wit, his pasty face wearing an air of settled melancholy, while he gazed vacantly at a curious old Turner, which glowed like an American sunset against the stamped-leather hangings of the room. "Poor fellow, he looks like the clown before he is painted," whispered Miss Windsor. Mr. Prouty, the _Saturday Reviewer_, sat on a "conversazione" with Lady Carringford, a commonplace, faded-out-looking woman of forty, with bleached hair. She did not seem much pleased by the conversation of the journalist, and looked furtively across the room as if to hint that she ought to be relieved, but Herr Diddlej and Sydney did not see her signals of distress. Lord Carringford, her husband, a tall, keen-faced man with blue-black side-whiskers and a furtive eye, was talking with Mr. Windsor, and though he saw his wife's signals, of course, did not pay any attention to them. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in rusty clerical garb, smiled benignly at the whole company. "Mrs. Oswald Carey is far too clever to stay in the glare of a great room like this," said Miss Windsor to Geoffrey. "She is one of those women who seek a corner and quiet and flourish there--not, however, alone. She is in the smaller room beyond, with Colonel Featherstone, who must have nearly pulled his great mustaches out by this time. You know how he twirls and twitches them when he thinks he is being quite irresistible, just as you are doing now, Lord Brompton." Geoffrey dropped his hand from his mustache impatiently. "Ah, you are always chaffing me, Miss Windsor," he pleaded.