"Show him in," cried her mistress, throwing her legs smartly off the Chesterfield, adjusting her dress with a few swift touches, and then reclining limply amid the cushions in a manner suggesting extreme feebleness and fatigue. The maid reappeared and ushered in a very much over-dressed old gentleman. He stood for some seconds on the threshold, smiling engagingly into the room. It was difficult to refrain from the thought that his affability was largely the outcome of entire self-satisfaction; for as he posed in the full light of the window, there was that about his attitude and expression which seemed to invite and defy the most searching inspection. Nor did his eyes smile with true kindliness, but rather with the conscious triumph of the attractive debutante. Mrs. Delarayne quietly noticed all these familiar traits in her friend, and responded in the expected manner with one or two idle compliments that afforded him infinite satisfaction. "No, sit here beside me," she whispered, as if every effort to speak might prove too much for her. Sir Joseph did as he was bid, lingered tenderly over the handshake, and gazed with strained sympathy into his companion's healthy face. "Younger than ever!" he exclaimed, "but not very well I fear." He was accustomed to Mrs. Delarayne's occasional affectation of valetudinarian peevishness, alleged ill-health as a fact. As a rule it was the prelude to the request for a favour on a grand scale, and being a man of very great wealth, and therefore somewhat tight-fisted, he was always rendered unusually solemn by his friend's fits of indisposition. They chatted idly for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were not immediately made to cease. It was a strange relationship that united these two people. Although Sir Joseph was not more than five years the lady's senior, she always treated him as if he belonged to a previous geological period; and he, chivalrously shouldering the burden of aeons, had acquired the courteous habit of opening all his anecdotal pronouncements with such words as: "You would not remember old so-and-so," or "You cannot be expected to remember the days when";--a formality which, while it delighted Mrs. Delarayne, convinced her more and more that although Sir Joseph might make an excellent ancestor, it would have been an indignity for a woman of her years to accept him as a lover.