This was a youngish woman, though younger in form than in face, bareheaded and wearing a very short white skirt and a flame-coloured silk jacket. It was almost like seeing a tongue of electric fire, brilliant, supple, cold, run in among them, so different was she from the sunlight which seemed so completely madame Vervier’s element. It did not surprise Giles to gather, presently, that mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine was an actress, and a distinguished one. She was charming; he had seen that at once; but he had seen as soon that it was a charm with which he had nothing at all to do; the sort of charm one expected to pay ten-and-six for the sight and sound of and to feel, while it operated upon you, safely barred away from by a row of footlights. A presence so brilliant could not be said to cast a chill, but for Giles it certainly cast a discomfort. Who was she? What did she mean? Where had she come from, this young woman so lean, so white, so sickly-looking, yet so tough? Her smile, as she bit into her _madeleine_, brought a long dimple that was almost a wrinkle into her cheek and her long, pale eyes scintillated under darkened lashes. He realized how noticeably independent of artificial aids to significance was madame Vervier from noting how frankly mademoiselle Fontaine had made use of them. She might even, by nature, he surmised, be a swarthy woman; but art had transformed her to a dazzling whiteness and her crinkled hair, that might be really black, repeated the lustrous flame of her jacket. Something in the fervour of her thin, gay lip, in the vigour of her thin, questing nose, even suggested to Giles a Semitic strain; but upon the racial edifice she had laid a pattern of strange, chiming colour that seemed in its vehemence and oddity to alter the very contour of her face. She had made of herself what she would; what she was, was unfathomable by any plummet in Giles’s possession. They were all talking and laughing, all except Alix, who sat silent beside her mother, and the young artist with the dark, suffering head. He drank coffee; three cups of it, and black. Monsieur de Maubert’s sonorous tones were lifted by a note of drollery. “He has lost himself in the clouds of mysticism.” They were talking of the book of a friend. “To stumble among rocks is less disconcerting than to stumble among clouds. _Il erre—il erre_— One sees him wandering away into the fog of his own imaginations.” “Did you enjoy yourself in England, mademoiselle Alix?” mademoiselle Fontaine asked. “Did you make good studies there?” “Yes. I went to a Lycée with the sisters of monsieur Bradley,” said Alix.