Five minutes after they had assembled Margaret Ducie entered the room. Lord Camberley had seen her several times previously, but to Bootle and Philip she was a stranger. Her brother introduced them. There was perhaps a shade more cordiality in the greeting she accorded to Bootle than in the one she vouchsafed to Philip. Camberley, the cynical, who was looking on, and who prided himself, with or without cause, on his knowledge of the sex, muttered under his breath, "She knows already which is the rich man and which the poor clerk. Lennox must have put her up to that." Mrs. Ducie was a brunette. She had a great quantity of jet-black silky hair, and large black liquid eyes. Her nose was thin, high-bred, and aquiline, and she rarely spoke without smiling. Her figure was tall and somewhat meagre in its outlines; but whether she sat, or stood, or walked, every movement and every pose was instinct with a sort of picturesque and unstudied grace. She dressed very quietly, and when abroad her almost invariable wear was a gown of some plain black material. But about that simple garment there was a style, a fit, a suspicion of something in cut or trimming, in the elaboration of a flounce here or the addition of a furbelow there, that to the observant mind hinted at the latest Parisian audacity, and of secrets which as yet were scarcely whispered beyond Mayfair. The ladies of Nullington and its neighbourhood could only envy and admire, and imitate afar off. Mrs. Ducie was one of those women whose age it is next to impossible to guess correctly. "She's thirty if she's a day," Lord Camberley had said to himself, within five minutes of his introduction to her. "She can't possibly be more than three-and-twenty," was Philip Cleeve's verdict to-day. The truth, in all probability, lay somewhere between the two. Whatever her age might be, Lord Camberley had a great admiration for Mrs. Ducie, but it was after a fashion of his own. He was thoroughly artificial himself, and rustic beauty, or simplicity eating bread and butter in a white frock, had no charms for him. He liked a woman who had seen and studied the world of "men and manners;" and that Mrs. Ducie had travelled much, and seen many phases of life, he was beginning by this time to discover. He was on his guard when he first made her acquaintance, lest he might be walking into a matrimonial trap, artfully baited by herself and her brother; for Lord Camberley was a mark for anxious mothers and daughters: not but that he felt himself quite capable of looking after his own interests on that point. Still, however wide-awake a man may believe himself to be, it is always best to be wary in this crafty world; and very wary he was the first three or four times he visited The Lilacs. He was not long, however, in perceiving that, whatever matrimonial designs Margaret Ducie might or might not have elsewhere, she was without any as far as he was concerned; and from that time he felt at ease in the cottage.