"It is the very image of you. She has your air and carriage of the head, and--and--" he looked at it very carefully under the electric light which sprouts from a twisted bunch of brass lilies on the wall, their stalks suggesting a modern Louis XV. nightmare. "And what?" "Well, never mind. Now I want to hear her story." And we both sat down again for the third time on the tulip-sofa. I told him the history just as I had told him the outline of my life the day in the Harley woods. Only, as then I felt I was speaking of another person, now I seemed to be talking of myself when I came to the part of walking up the guillotine steps. "And so they cut her head off--poor little lady!" said Antony, when I had finished, and he looked straight into my eyes. The pillow of art-needlework and frills had fallen to the floor--even it could not remain comfortably on the hard seat! There was nothing between us on the sofa. Antony leaned forward, close to me. His voice was strangely moved. "Comtesse!" he began, when McGreggor knocked at the door. "Mr. Gurrage is calling you, ma'am," she said, in her heavy, Scotch voice, "and he seems in a hurry, ma'am." "Ambrosine!" echoed impatiently in the hall. "Why, it must be dressing-time!" said Antony, calmly, looking at his watch. "I must not keep you," and he quietly left the room as Augustus burst in from my bedroom door. "Where on earth have you been?" he said, crossly. "That Dodd woman has been driving us all mad! Willie Dodd came and joined us at bridge and took McCormack's place, and the old she-tike came after him and chattered like a monkey until she got him away. Where were you that you did not look after her?" "I was here, in my sitting-room, talking to Sir Antony Thornhirst," I said, almost laughing. The picture of Mrs. Dodd at the bridge-table amused me to think of. Augustus saw me smiling, and he looked less ruffled. "She is an old wretch," he said. "I wish I had not to ask Willie Dodd every year, but business is business, and I'll trouble you to be civil to them. We will weed out the whole of this lot, gradually, now. The mater will go off to Bournemouth at this time of the year, and so, by-and-by, we can have nothing but smart people." The evening passed in an endless, boring round. This sort of company does not adapt itself as the people at Harley did. With my best endeavors to be a good hostess, the uneasiness of my guests prevented me from making them feel comfortable or at home. Mrs. Dodd's impertinence would have been insupportable if it had not been so funny. She complained of most things--the draughts, the inconvenience of the hours of the train departures, and so on. She was gorgeously dressed and hung with diamonds. Without being exceptionally stout, everything is so tight and pushed-up that she seems to come straight out from her chin in a kind of platform, where the diamonds lose themselves in a narrow, perpendicular depression in the middle.