'I don't see how anyone can be anything else but miserable at the thought of all the wretchedness there is in the world. The only thing to keep one from despairing over it would be to do something, even if it were ever so little, to help forward a better time. I dare say your father is right, and this present state is very strong, and perhaps none of us' (with whom was she classing herself?) 'will live to see what we are longing for! It would be rather nice,' she went on meditatively, 'to have that other verse on one's grave,—

"The day I lived in was not mine,
Man gets no second day;
In dreams I saw the future shine,
But, ah! I could not stay."'

'This is too much,' cried Cora, jumping up. 'When it comes to choosing your own epitaph I think it's high time we gave the March winds a chance of blowing the cobwebs out of your brain. We'll have a run. Come along; the streets are deliciously dusty.'

Clare rose, smilingly obedient, and as she did so the room door opened slowly and admitted Mrs Quaid. She sank on to the sofa from which Miss Stanley had just risen.

'Such a fatiguing time I have had,' she said, with a long-drawn breath of relief, as she leaned back on the cushions and loosened her bonnet-strings. 'Mrs Paget was out, and of the ten ladies who are on our Educational Committee only two attended besides myself. Really, people have no energy. And then, my shopping took me so much longer than I expected—these new shades are so difficult to match—and at last, when I felt quite worn out, and was just going into Roper's for a glass of sherry and a biscuit, whoever do you think I ran across, treating two ragged children to buns?'

'Count Litvinoff?' from Cora.

'No—oh no. It was Mr Petrovitch, and when he saw me he hustled the poor little things out of the shop as though he were ashamed of them, and he stayed talking to me ever so long, and was quite delightful, and—Clare, my sweet, this will please you, you were so much taken with him—he is coming to see us this evening. Won't that be charming?'

'I am very glad,' said Claire simply, while Cora busied herself in loosening her mother's cloak, and waiting on her in various little ways. 'I seemed to learn so much from him the last time I heard him.'

'Yes, and a friend of his is coming as well—a deliciously savage-looking Austrian, named Hirsch—who was there too, and who seems quite like our friend's shadow, and, as Mr Vernon is coming also, we shall be quite a pleasant little party, all sympathising with each other's feelings, and that's the great thing, you know.'

'I wonder if Count Litvinoff will look in,' mused Cora, rubbing her mother's rich sable muff round and round the wrong way.