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pointed beard, Vivian; it makes you look diplomatic—an excellent impression for such impulsive warm-heartedness as yours to give; it must keep people off a little more."

"I like them on, you know. Of the people coming and going, Constance, who was the extraordinary young lady who was sitting here when I came in?"

The day was normal again, and mere curiosity was, normally, his only feeling.

Mrs. Graham's blue eyes attached themselves to his for a swift moment, and seemed to question him with a curiosity deeper than his own; but they returned placidly to her tea-pot as she replenished it from the kettle and asked: "Which young lady? There are four in the house, including my own Gladys, whom you remember."

"She was tall and slender, and black and white, with very large, wide-opened eyes."

"Oh—my niece. You remember poor Hugh died two years ago. This is his girl, Madeline Tristram. I 've taken her to live with me. Her mother's people, who had her at first, did n't make her happy; they are of the merely fashionable type, and Madeline does n't care much about going out. She has been with me for a year. But why extraordinary?" Mrs. Graham added.

Maverley felt in the question an unconscious reproof of the absurd mood.

"Well, she is beautiful—extraordinarily beautiful."

"Yes, she is," said Mrs. Graham. And she went on after a slight pause: "She is a very clever girl, and, above all, a very good girl. She is always working at some dull drudgery for some dull committee. I almost resent her youth and beauty being dedicated to all the more thankless tasks of our modern highly organized charities; but she seems to like it."

"She is certainly wonderfully beautiful," Maverley repeated.

He did not see Miss Tristram again until dinner-time; and then, as she was the last to come in, he saw first the group in which Mrs. Graham had placed her,—three of the four girls: Gladys; and Mary Grey, who was ugly, intelligent, with prominent teeth; and Frances Goldworthy, who was pretty and very young, and engaged in a love-affair, not yet decisive, with young Collin Thornton. This group stood out in graceful freshness on a sober background of married couples. Sir Archie Fleetwood, an amusing, languid youth; Collin Thornton himself; and a cheerful, callow boy, son of a neighboring squire, were the bachelors of the party. The lamps had not yet been brought, and the drawing-room was cool with the twilight coolness outside. The cries and laughter of the younger Graham children came from the dewy lawns. Miss Goldworthy laughed on a sofa with her suitor, and talk flowed happily when Madeline Tristram entered. The girl, again in white, but an unrelieved white hardly distinguishable in the dusk from her arms and neck, gave Maverley the strangest impression of solitude as she walked down the long room, smiling calmly and steadily, but not as though she smiled at anybody. She was, indeed, extraordinarily beautiful, and that perhaps explained the sudden hush that greeted her. People naturally turned to look, and, naturally no doubt, stopped talking for a moment.

"Vivian, you have n't formally met my niece," Mrs. Graham said, detaining Madeline by the hand as the girl was passing her, on her way, apparently, to a solitary chair near the window.

"Not formally," said Maverley, smiling.

"This is an old friend of ours, Madeline," Mrs. Graham added, still holding the girl by her hand.

"I knew your father," said Maverley. The pale, shining eyes were on his, and, simple and unembarrassed in her silence, she still smiled; her delicate lips seemed set in that line of faint smiling. "I knew him in India; I 've spent a lot of my life out there."

"Madeline was born in India." Mrs. Graham softly tapped the hand she held upon her chair-arm.

"That was before my day. It must have been while I was at Eton." He paternally recognized Miss Tristram's youth.

"Yes, Madeline is twenty-three," Mrs. Graham assented to his chronology; "but you can hardly compare Indian notes—she left it when she was only a few months old."

"Ah, yes," Maverley repeated. He remembered that Hugh Tristram's wife had died in India. Quietly as the girl looked from one to the other while they spoke of her, he felt, before her silence, a growing discomfort—to call it by a tepid name. He must master it, or, once more, his nerves might play him that ludicrous trick;