She had talked on for nearly an hour when another visitor was announced. This proved to be a young man slightly known to Gavan, a graceful, mellifluous youth, whose artificiality of manner and great personal beauty suggested a mingling of absinthe and honey. People had rather bracketed Gavan and Basil Mayburn together; one could easily deal with both as lumped in the same category,--charming drifters, softly disdainful of worldly aims and efforts. Mayburn himself took sympathy for granted, though disconcerted at times by finding his grasp of the older man to be on a sliding, slippery surface. Palairet had, to be sure, altogether the proper appreciations of art and literature, the rhythm of highly evolved human intercourse; the aroma distilled for the esthete from the vast tragic comedy of life; so that he had never quite satisfied himself as to why he could get no nearer on this common footing. Palairet was always charming, always interested, always courteous; but one’s hold did slip. And to Gavan, Basil Mayburn, with his fluent ecstasies, seemed a sojourner in a funny half-way house. To Mayburn the hallucination of life was worth while esthetically. His own initial appeal to life had been too fundamentally spiritual for the beautiful to be more to him than a second-rate illusion. Miss Allen greeted Mr. Mayburn with a coolness that at once discriminated for Gavan between her instinctive liking for himself and her shrinking from a man who perplexed and displeased her. Mayburn was all glad sweetness: delighted to see Miss Allen; delighted to see Palairet; delighted to wait in their company for the delightful Miss Gifford; and, turning to Miss Allen, he went on to say, as a thing that would engage her sympathies, that he had just come from a service at the Oratory. “I often go there,” he said; “one gets, as nowhere else that I know of in London, the quintessence of aspiration--the age-long yearning of the world. How are your schemes for having that little church built down here succeeding? I do so believe in it. Don’t let any ugly sect steal a march on you.” Miss Allen primly replied that the plans for the church were prospering; and adding that Miss Gifford would be here in a moment and that she must leave them, she gathered up her work and departed with some emphasis.