In the middle of October, when most men I knew were away on the moors, I had a dinner engagement one evening with the Channings, in Cornwall Gardens. Colonel Channing, a retired officer of the Guards, was a man I had known during greater part of my lifetime. His service had been mainly of a diplomatic character, for he had served as British military _attache_ at Berlin and Vienna, and now lived with his wife and daughter in London, and seemed to divide his time mainly between the St James's and the United Service Clubs. He was a merry old fellow, with white hair and moustache and a florid complexion, the dandified air of _attache_ still clinging to him. As he sat at the head of his table, his habitual monocle in his eye, and the tiny green ribbon of the order of the Crown of Italy in the lapel of his dining-jacket, he looked a perfect type of the _ex-attache_. His wife, a rather spare woman of fifty, who seemed to exist externally in a toilette of black satin and lace, was pleasant, though just a trifle stiff, probably because of her long association with other diplomatists' wives; while Nellie Channing was a happy, fair-haired girl, who wore pretty blouses, motored, golfed, flirted and shopped in the High Street in the most approved manner of the average girl of South Kensington. Nellie and I had always been good friends. She had been at school in England while her parents had been abroad, but on completing her education she had lived some five years or so in Vienna, and had thus acquired something of the cosmopolitan habit of her father. She looked charming in her pink blouse, a trifle _decollete_, as she sat on my left at dinner, and congratulated me upon my recovery. If, however, Nellie Channing was pretty, her beauty was far eclipsed by that of my neighbour on my right, a tall, dark-haired girl in blue, a Miss Anson, who with her mother, a quiet, white-haired elderly lady, were the only other guests in addition to myself. From the moment we were introduced I saw that Mrs Anson's daughter possessed a face that was absolutely perfect, rather oval in shape, with large, beautiful eyes, that seemed to shine as they looked upon me, and to search me through and through. Her complexion was good, her cheeks well-moulded, her mouth small and perfectly formed; her teeth gleamed white ever and anon as she smiled at the Colonel's humorous remarks, and her nose was just sufficiently tip-tilted to give her countenance a piquant air of coquetry.