“As you two are such great friends already, I suppose it’s waste of time introducing you.” “Really—” Edwin protested. “Very well, then. Dr. Ingleby: Miss Rosie Beaucaire. I never get the order right. You can take it or leave it. May he come to tea with us, Rosie?” “Of course he may.” “Come along then, both of you . . .” CHAPTER X WHITE ROSES I IT was the first of many amazing adventures, to which Matthew Boyce supplied a calculated and cynical commentary, watching Edwin as though he were the subject of a physiological experiment—as indeed he was. But lack of sympathy in one quarter was scarcely likely to worry Edwin when he had found it so overwhelmingly in another. In a few days Miss Latham, the most tactful of duennas, had withdrawn from the scene. On the first night of their acquaintance Edwin had taken the hazel-eyed Miss Beaucaire back to her lodgings in Prince Albert’s Place at the back of the theatre, where the pantomime was in rehearsal. All the way through the squalid, lamp-lit streets they had talked of things that were entrancing, simply because they had to do with her. Edwin thought that no companionship in all his life had been so natural and so easy; and this was not surprising, for the young woman, in addition to physical charms that were armoury enough in themselves, had developed the faculty commonly acquired by ladies of her profession, of devoting herself entirely to the companion of the moment and giving the impression that she had never known, and would never want to know, any other person in the world. Rosie was only twenty-four, but had given at least the last third of her life to studying male of the species of which Edwin was a peculiarly ingenuous example. At the door of her lodgings she had conjured an atmosphere of mysterious intimacy. Speaking in a voice that was low and of a thrilling tenderness, she had said:— “I mustn’t ask you to come in to-day. It’s a dreadful shame; but mother has one of her headaches, and the noise might disturb her. You understand, don’t you?” Edwin, with a vision of an elderly and delicate version of Rosie herself lying on a sofa with a handkerchief dipped in eau-de-cologne over her eyes, assented. He thought it a very beautiful consideration on Rosie’s part. A small black and tan terrier came dancing into the hall with a friendly yelp. “Be quiet, Imp . . . oh, _do_ be quiet! Isn’t he a duck?” she said. “Now, I must really go.” She held out her hand. A moment before she had taken off her glove, and Edwin, who had scarcely ever touched the hand of a woman before, thought that her fingers were the softest and most delicate things on earth. “You’ll come and have tea with us, won’t you? I should like you to meet mother.” “Of course, I’d like to. When?”