"Whatever is the matter?" cried his sister, entering the sitting-room. She and Gertrude had just come up together from the studio, where Conny had been pouring out her soul as to the hollowness of the world, a fact she was in the habit periodically of discovering. "Fred, what a shocking noise!" "Oh, shut up, Con, and let a fellow alone," grumbled Fred, subsiding into a chair. "Conny's been dancing every night this week--making me take her, too, by Jove!--and now, if you please, she's got hot coppers." Miss Devonshire deigned no reply to these remarks, and Phyllis, who, like all of them, was accustomed to occasional sparring between the brother and sister, threw herself into the breach. "You're the very creature I want, Conny," she cried. "Come over here; perhaps you can enlighten me about the person who interests me more than any one in the world." "Phyllis!" protested Fan, who understood the allusion. "It's your man opposite," went on Phyllis, unabashed; "Lucy and I are longing to know all about him. There he is on the doorstep; why, he only went out half an hour ago!" "That fellow," said Fred, with unutterable contempt; "that foreign-looking chap whom Conny dances half the night with?" "Foreign-looking," said Phyllis, "I should just think he was! Why, he might have stepped straight out of a Venetian portrait; a Tintoretto, a Bordone, any one of those _mellow_ people." "Only as regards colouring," put in Lucy, whose interest in the subject appeared to be comparatively mild. "I don't believe those old Venetian nobles dashed about in that headlong fashion. I often wonder what his business can be that keeps him running in and out all day." Fortunately for Constance, the fading light of the December afternoon concealed the fact that she was blushing furiously, as she replied coolly enough, "Oh, Frank Jermyn? he's an artist; works chiefly in black and white for the illustrated papers, I think. He and another man have a studio in York Place together." "Is he an Englishman?" "Yes; his people are Cornish clergymen." "All of them? 'What, all his pretty ones?'" cried Phyllis; "but you are very interesting, Conny, to-day. Poor fellow, he looks a little lonely sometimes; although he has a great many oddly-assorted pals." "By the bye," went on Conny, still maintaining her severely neutral tone, "he mentioned the photographic studio, and wanted to know all about 'G. and L. Lorimer.'" "Did you tell him," answered Phyllis, "that if you lived opposite four beautiful, fallen princesses, who kept a photographer's shop, you would at least call and be photographed." "It is so much nicer of him that he does not," said Lucy, with decision. Phyllis struck an attitude: "It might have been, once only, We lodged in a street together ..." she began, then stopped short suddenly. "What a thundering row!" said Fred. A curious, scuffling sound, coming from the room below, was distinctly audible.