down. As he turned, his gaze encountered an oil-painting hanging above the mantelpiece.
"By George! How did I manage to miss that?"
He stared at it with intense interest—almost with a sense of shock. Somewhere—he could not determine where—he had seen that face before.
The picture was a half-length portrait of a woman. There was something extraordinarily queenly and at the same time patient in her attitude. Her hands, which were out of sight, seemed to be folded. She was seated, leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat, which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls. But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the rounded strength of her head that gave to her that peculiarly alert beauty. Her dark hair was drawn from off her forehead, making clear in her features an expression of calm challenge. She was a woman who had lived and not always happily. Her calmness was the quiet of almost painful self-control. And her age—— With her atmosphere of experience, it was certainly over thirty. She was not the woman to put back the hands of time for any man.
"It can't be of Maisie," he thought, and yet he hoped. "But it can't be of her," he insisted. "This woman is remote and uncapturable. She's done with passion. She's tasted life to the full and the taste
was bitter. She has nothing left but her unquenchable pride, with which she tortures herself: her pride not to submit, not to cry out, to stand always at bay. That's all she has, unless——" And then, speaking aloud in his effort to remember, "I know her. I'm positive. And yet——"
The door behind him opened. "This is nice of you, Lord Taborley.—Ah, you were looking at Di! Most men do that when they visit me. I ought to be jealous. But a word of warning; looking is as far as any of them get."
Tabs found himself shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's charm lay in her accessibility—the genial promise she held out of being willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture proclaimed her anxiety to find this world a pleasant place—her determination to make it pleasant and to be gay under every circumstance.
She was as little, flawless and gleaming as her house. More than half her good looks were due to the immaculate care which she bestowed on her body—the whiteness of her teeth, the fineness of her well-kept hands, the brilliant clearness of her complexion, the wavy smoothness of her abundant flaxen hair which had been brushed and brushed until it shone and glinted like raw gold in sunshine. She would have looked almost too perfect to be genuine, had it not been for her vivid health. She was so dainty in her
fragility that one longed and yet scarcely dared to touch her.