She looked up at him, her little opaque green eyes a trifle softened. "I am trying to get you the prettiest woman in America," she said. "I'm ready to fight off everybody else--beat 'em to death," she added, her eyes snapping, then suddenly kind again--"because, Sir Charles, I like you. And for no other reason on earth!" Which was not the exact truth. It was for another man's sake she was kind to him. And the other man had been dead many years. Sir Charles thanked her, awkwardly, and fell silent again, pulling his moustache. "Is--Mrs. Leeds--well?" he ventured, at length, reddening again. "Perfectly. She's a bit wiry just now--thin--leggy, y' know. Some fanciers prefer 'em weedy. But she'll plump up. I know the breed." He shrank from her loud voice and the vulgarity of her comments, and she was aware of it and didn't care a rap. There were plenty of noble ladies as vulgar as she, and more so--and anyway it was not this well-built, sober-faced man of forty-five whom she was serving with all the craft and insolence and brutality and generosity that was in her--it was the son of a dead man who had been much to her. How much nobody in these days gossiped about any longer, for it was a long time ago, a long, long time ago that she had made her curtsey to a young queen and a prince consort. And Sir Charles's father had died at Majuba Hill. "There's a wretched little knock-kneed peer on the cards," she observed; "Dankmere. He seems to think she has money or something. If he comes over here, as my sister writes, I'll set him straighter than his own legs. And I've written Foxy to tell him so." "Dankmere is a very good chap," said Sir Charles, terribly embarrassed. "But not good enough. His level is the Quartier d'Europe. He'll find it; no fear.... When do you go South?" "To-morrow," he said, so honestly that she grinned again. "Then I'll give you a letter to Molly Wycherly. Her husband is Jim Wycherly--one of your sort--eternally lumbering after something to kill. He has a bungalow on some lagoon where he murders ducks, and no doubt he'll go there. But his wife will be stopping at Palm Beach. I'll send you a letter to her in the morning." "Many thanks," said Sir Charles, shyly. CHAPTER IV Strelsa remained South longer than she had expected to remain, and at the end of the third week Quarren wrote her. "DEAR MRS. LEEDS: "Will you accept from me a copy of Karl's new book? And are you ever coming back? You are missing an unusually diverting winter; the opera is exceptional, there are some really interesting plays in town and several new and amusing people--Prince and Princess Sarnoff for example; and the Earl of Dankmere, an anxious, and perplexed little man, sadly hard up, and simple-minded enough to say so; which amuses everybody immensely.