The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again. It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally--and the moment he saw her face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made together out of light and gilded cloud--he had somehow never imagined that she could be as--lustrous--as that--it gave him the sensation that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was there at all. He gathered his wits--it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time when he hadn't been invited--it forced him into being so casually polite. “Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance,” he said with a ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to triangular murder. “I hope I'm not--disturbing you?” “Oh no. No,” and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act. “Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, “Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?” That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.