“Oh, Jimmie--just fancy! Mrs. Deering is going to take me to Horlingham on Saturday, and is coming upstairs with me to see what I can do in the way of a frock. You don't mind, do you?” Jimmie looked down into the happy young face and laughed a happy laugh. “Mrs. Deering is an angel from the most exclusive part of heaven,” he said. And this was one of the rare occasions on which he was guilty of a double meaning. Had not the angel thus contrived an unlooked-for joy--a few minutes' undisturbed communion with his divinity? The first words that Norma spoke when they were alone were an apology. “You must not take what my mother said in ill part. She and I have been bred, I'm afraid, in a hard school.” “It was very kind of Mrs. Hardacre to warn me of the possibility of the duchess being prejudiced against me by the exhibition of a particular portrait. I can't conceive the possibility myself. But still Mrs. Hardacre's intention was kindly.” Norma turned her head away for a moment. She could not trust herself to speak, for a stinging sarcasm with just a touch of the hysterical would have been all she could utter, and she had not the heart to undeceive him. She shot into the by-path of the gossip concerning Mrs. Hewson. “Mother believes the stories about her. So do I in the loose sort of way in which our faith in anything is composed--even in our fellow-creatures' failings.” “You defended her,” said Jimmie. “You made me do so.” “I?” “Either you, because you carry about with you an uncomfortable Palace of Truth sort of atmosphere, or else the desire to rub it into my mother.” “Rub what in?” Jimmie was puzzled. Norma laughed somewhat bitterly. She saw that he was incapable of understanding the vulgar pettiness of the scheme of motives that had prompted the utterances of her mother and herself. She could not explain. “I think you are born out of your century,” she said. It was lucky for Jimmie that he was unaware of the passionate tribute the light words implied. She gave him no time to answer, but carried him straight to the pictures. “I had no idea you did such beautiful work,” she said, looking around her. Jimmie followed her glance, and the melancholy of the artist laid its touch for a moment upon him. He sighed. “They might have been beautiful if I had done what I started out to do. It is the eternal tragedy of the clipped wings.” She was oddly responsive to a vibration in his voice, and gave out, like a passive violin, the harmonic of the struck note. “Better to have wings that are clipped than to have no wings at all.” She had never uttered such a sentiment, never thought such a thought in her life before. Her words sounded unreal in her own ears, and yet she had a profound sense of their sincerity.