Jewel? She was _tete-a-tete_ with a distinguished gentleman, from whom she could not escape just now with strict courtesy. She listened with a forced smile to his fluent periods, and furtively watched the pair over yonder, coquetting, as she said angrily to herself, over their fragrant cups of tea and thin cakes. Miss Brooke's exquisite beauty appeared to advantage in a close-fitting tailor suit of broadcloth. A plumed turban of the same becoming hue set off her rippling golden hair. She said to her companion, with a fast-beating heart: "Miss Fielding has told me, Mr. Meredith, that you were abroad two years. Of course you visited England. Did you see Cornwall? My home is there. It is quite a show-place, being very ancient, and having a magnificent picture-gallery." He said audaciously that he had been in England, and should have gone down to Cornwall to see Lord Ivon's pictures if he could have believed that there was anything on canvas there half as lovely as herself. Miss Brooke shook her spoon at him in playful reproof, and he continued: "I spent most of my time, however, at a German university." Azalia gave an uncontrollable start that jarred the cup in her hand and made the tea splash over a little on her lap. "How awkward I am!" she said, laughing. "Ah! and so you were a German student, Mr. Meredith?" "Yes, for a time," he replied. "Not that I cared much for it, but my father was so anxious for it before his death that I went afterward, just because he had wished it--not that I benefited much by it, I fear. My thoughts were full of other things." Azalia swallowed her tea at a draught in order not to spill any more on her dress. She looked at him then, and said: "So your father is dead? That is sad. Mine died when I was a very tiny baby. I have often wished that he had lived that I might have known the pleasure of a father's love and care." Her voice was low with regret and pain. His soul stirred with sympathy. "You have much to regret in losing your father so soon," he said. "I can not tell you what mine was to me, what a mentor, what a friend, until his death nearly three years ago." "Three years!" she echoed, faintly, and the pretty eggshell china tea-cup fell from her hands to the carpet, crashing into a dozen fragments. "Oh, dear, how very careless I am!" she exclaimed, dismayed at the attention she attracted by her accident. She saw Jewel looking at her with jealous suspicion, but took no notice, and as a servant appeared to remove the _debris_, she turned smilingly back to her companion and said, lightly: "Everything slips through my fingers," and added, miserably, to herself, "Love and happiness with the rest!" He was about to reply with some admiring sentence, when he saw Jewel coming over to them with a bright smile that was assumed to veil her jealous spite. "Laurie, what did you say to Miss Brooke to shock her into breaking her tea-cup?" playfully. He answered, as he rose to place a chair for her: