"Yes," Louise replied with the slightest possible increase of colour in her face. "Lennox and Captain Hillyer. We shall be quite a cheerful Easter party, if only papa gets better quickly." "Dear me," thought Miss Norreys, who was not above all feminine weaknesses, "I do feel _very_ angry with you, Winifred Maryon. I shall be all wrong about my clothes even: I shall have to telegraph for evening dresses." They were entering the drive by now. It was in keeping with all the rest. Long and straight, with thickly growing trees at each side, which gave an additional touch of mystery to the approach to the house. And though straight--so that the building standing somewhat high on its terraced summit, was conspicuous, the white flights of steps, gleaming like the walls themselves in the sunshine--the road dipped considerably, though gradually, here and there, causing all but the turrets, from which the house evidently took its name, momentarily to disappear. Hertha, for the time, forgot all else in her true sense of pleasure and interest. And no words she could have chosen, had she been the most calculating of mortals, would have made such a pleasing impression in the still dubious Mrs Maryon as those with which her new guest replied to her words of cordial but slightly constrained greeting. "I have never been so enchanted by anything as by the first sight of your exquisite old house. I feel for once in real fairy-land." And graceful Celia, in her pale-grey dress, with a flush on her cheeks and shy welcome in her lovely eyes, might, indeed, have been the Sleeping Beauty just awakened. That "first impression" grew instead of fading, for it was well rooted. Both Mrs Maryon and her guest, so different in all else, so entirely unlike each other in the circumstances of their lives--the one so sheltered and protected, so curiously ignorant of life save in her own experience of it; the other, so early thrown upon herself, clung to by others at an age when most are still clinging and dependent; yet neither of the two either narrowed or hardened--these two, thanks to their genuine womanliness and unselfish single-mindedness, made friends, and such a friendship lasts.