"Yes," said Winifred, "we did. But it does not need time to make friends when people are sympathetic. Mr Sunningdale has evidently thought out all the great questions of the day about women most thoroughly." She looked so bright and happy, so handsome and almost brilliant, that her younger sister gazed in loving admiration. "Dear Winifred," she said to herself. "No wonder Mr Sunningdale or Mr Anybody admires her when she looks like that. I do feel sorry for dear old Lennox though." Poor Mr Sunningdale! Much had been credited to him which he would have been greatly astonished to hear of. He was, as has been said, a kind-hearted and eminently good-natured man; a man, too, who not only had a special line of distinction, but was above the smallness of being ashamed of talking about what he really understood. And Winifred Maryon was certainly intelligent enough to be a good listener, all of which explains the two having "got on so well." It was not, to do her justice, till towards the end of dinner that Winifred ventured to allude to her aspirations. And the great man, gratified, as even great men can be, by the enthusiastic admiration--or veneration--in the girl's bright eyes, listened--how could he have done less?--to her confidences, with here and there a word or smile of kindly, half-amused encouragement. Though, truth to tell, the subject matter of these same confidences, if it did not go in at one ear to come out at the other, left but the vaguest and most fleeting impression behind it. "Pretty girl--handsome rather than pretty--intelligent, too, but rather bitten by the advanced ideas of the day. She'll settle down when she's married," was his commentary upon her to his hostess. "An heiress, did you say? All the better, if she falls into good hands." And if Mrs Balderson had begun to build air-castles as to the possible consequences of her introduction--Winifred being, as she expressed it, "just the sort of girl to prefer a man a good deal older than herself"-- they speedily fell to the ground. Mr Sunningdale had a history: the not uncommon one of an adored girl-wife dead almost before he had realised she was his. And, despite the cynicism which many declared lay beneath his surface good-nature, there was something deeper down still. He was not the man to dream of a second marriage. Nor, as we know, were Miss Maryon's ideas likely to turn the least in such "commonplace" directions. The results of this first taste of London society were, however, to all appearance, eminently satisfactory. Winifred, as she bade her kind hostess good-night, was profuse in her thanks for the delightful evening she had spent. And if Celia's pretty eyes had a slight shadow over them, it could only have been that she was a little tired, thought the good woman. "You took care of her at dinner, I hope, Eric?" she said to her son, who had been known to be afflicted with fits of absence on social occasions of the kind.