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was leaning and beckoning, ghost-fair in the dusk, from Lofty John’s bush.

“It was such a beautiful thing that just to be distantly compared to it made me feel very well pleased with myself, and it was lovely to have dear old Dean back again. So we had a delightful evening, and picked a big bunch of Cousin Jimmy’s pansies and watched the grey rainclouds draw together in great purple masses in the east, leaving the western sky all clear and star-powdered.

“‘There is something in your company,’ said Dean, ‘that makes stars seem starrier and pansies purpler.’

“Wasn't that nice of him! How is it that his opinion of me and Aunt Ruth’s opinion of me are so very different?

“He had a little flat parcel under his arm and when he went away he handed it to me.

“‘I brought you that to counteract Lord Byron,’ he said.

“It was a framed copy of the ‘Portrait of Giovanna Degli Albizzi, wife of Lorenzo Tornabuoni Ghirlandajo’—a Lady of the Quatro Cento. I brought it to Shrewsbury and have it hanging in my room. I love to look at the Lady Giovanna—that slim, beautiful young thing with her sleek coils of pale gold and her prim little curls and her fine, high-bred profile (did the painter flatter her?) and her white neck and open, unshadowed brow, with the indefinable air over it all of saintliness and remoteness and fate—for the Lady Giovanna died young.

“And her embroidered velvet sleeves, slashed and puffed, very beautifully made and fitting the arm perfectly. The Lady Giovanna must have had a good dressmaker and, in spite of her saintliness, one thinks she was quite aware of the fact. I am always wishing that she would turn her head and let me see her full face.

“Aunt Ruth thinks she is queer-looking and evidently doubts the propriety of having her in the same room with the jewelled chromo of Queen Alexandra.

“I doubt it myself.