The season was drawing to a close, and the early glories of the Lady's Mile had faded, when the dowager was well enough to array herself in black silk and diamonds, and to go to parties once more. She was nothing if not a woman of the world, and the chief consolation of her sick chamber had been the friendly visits of other dowagers and gossiping maiden-ladies, who brought her the freshest scandals of the West End. To her the dulness of the Dorset Square drawing-room had been far more painful than to Cecil; and within a week from the day on which her medical man pronounced her well enough to take an airing in the phantom chariot, she buckled on her armour of state, and accompanied Cecil to a ball at the house of the fashionable physician who had attended her occasionally during her illness. It was at this assembly that Cecil Chudleigh met the person who was destined to exercise a very powerful influence over her fate. Once in every season Dr. Molyneux's sombre old house in Harley Street burst into a sudden blaze of splendour and brightness. Once in every season the marble busts of divers pagan notabilities, more or less connected with the science of medicine, trembled on their scagliola pedestals as the light feet of fashionable beauty, and the varnished boots of gilded youth, trod the physician's stately chambers. The popular medical man gave many parties--snug dinners, at which the amber wines of the fair Rhineland, and the violet-scented vintages of Burgundy, were consumed by connoisseurs who could fix the date of a vintage as easily as an archæologist decides the period of a frieze or a column. But these pleasant dinner-parties were given chiefly to learned old fogies of the doctor's own profession, and were given for the doctor's own pleasure. It was only once in a year that he flung open his house for the benefit of polite society in general, and his own patience in particular. Guntor had _carte blanche_ on these occasions, and sent in a bill some six months afterwards, which was by no means a _carte blanche_. Groves of exotics and wagon-loads of evergreens came to Harley Street from unknown regions beyond the Edgware Road, and the doctor's patients, calling upon him on the morning before the festival, found the sombre hall a forest of moderator lamps, and candelabra, and the dining-room in which they were wont to wait the great physician's summons, completely abandoned to the possession of the confectioner's minions.