the impression they might make was the source of his habit, in London, of watching her covertly. He tried to see at a given moment how she looked, if she were happy; it was always with an intention of encouragement, and there was a frequent exchange between them of little invisible affectionate signs. She wore charming clothes, but she was terribly short; in England the girls were gigantic and it was only the tallest who were noticed. Their manners, alas, had nothing to do with it--many of them indeed hadn't any manners. As soon as he had got near Vera he said to her, scanning her through his single glass from head to foot: "Who is the young man who sat next you? the one at the other end of the room." "I don't know his name, papa--I didn't catch it." "Was he civil--did he talk to you?" "Oh, a great deal, papa--about all sorts of things." Something in the tone of her voice made him look with greater intensity and even with greater tenderness than usual into her little dim green eyes. "Then you're all right--you're getting on?" She gave her effusive smile--the one that perhaps wouldn't do in England. "Oh beautifully, papa--everyone's so kind." She never complained, was a brave little optimist, full of sweet resources; but he had detected to-day as soon as he looked at her the particular shade of her content. It made him continue, after an hesitation: "He didn't say anything about his relations--anything that could give you a clue?" Vera thought a moment. "Not that I can remember--unless that Mr. Crisford is painting the portrait of his mother. Ah, there it is!" the girl exclaimed, looking across the room at a large picture on an easel, which the young man had just approached and from which their host had removed the drapery that covered it. Maurice Glanvil had observed this drapery, and as the artist unveiled the canvas with a flourish he saw that he had been waiting for the ladies to show it, to produce a surprise, a grand effect. Everyone moved toward it, and Maurice, with his daughter beside him, recognised that the production, a portrait, was striking, a great success for Crisford--the figure, down to the knees, with an extraordinary look of life, of a tall, handsome woman of middle age, in full dress, in black. Yet he saw it for the moment vaguely, through a preoccupation, that of a discovery which he had just made and which had recalled to him an incident of his youth--his juxtaposition, in London, at a dinner, to a girl, insurmountably charmless to him, who had fallen in love with him (so that she was nearly to die of it), within the first five minutes, before he had even spoken; as he had subsequently learned from a communication made him by his poor mother--a reminder uttered with a pointless bitterness that he had failed to understand and accompanied with unsuspected details, much later--too late, long after his marriage and shortly before her death. He said to