Leaning over her dressing-table she scrutinized not her face, whose ardent beauty seemed to bloom upon the glass, but her hair as it fell and rippled and flowed round her brows. Along the edge of one of the lustrous waves was a touch as if her powder puff had brushed her hair. Mrs. Falconer put up her hand, smoothed the line, then let it lie as it grew. It so declared itself to be the first unmistakable white. A gardener's basket full of roses and camelias, gardenias and carnations had been sent up for her; but under the diamond at her breast she chose rather to fasten in a spray of mistletoe with its pale, grape-like berries. A long green scarf fell over her arm and against the whiteness of her dress like a branch of spring verdure, and permitted by the fashion of the day, there shook and trembled in her ears long, pear-shaped pearls which, like her thimble, had been her mother's. As she left the security of her room and fire for the corridors and the publicity of the lower rooms, for the first time in her life she had a sudden feeling of _pruderie_ at the bare beauty of her neck and arms. She felt as if she were coming unclad into the street, and drew her scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what extravagant bent could the two men have gone? "Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."