"Dear Mrs. Stewart,—Yesterday I was at Cochrane's studio and he told me Meres was the greatest authority in England on tapestry, and also a cousin of yours. Please remember (or forgive) the supper on Tuesday, and of your kindness, ask him to let me see his lot and give me his opinion on mine. Cochrane had a folly he called a portrait of you in his studio. I turned its face to the wall; and in the end he admitted I was right.
"Yours sincerely,
"George Goring."
Accordingly, on a very hot day early in July, Goring met Mildred again, at Sir Cyril Meres's house on Campden Hill. The long room at one end of which stood the small dining-table looked on the greenness of a lawny, lilac-sheltered garden, so that such light as filtered through the green jalousies was green also. There was a great block of ice somewhere in the room, and so cool it was, so greenly dim there, that it seemed almost like a cavern of the sea. Mildred wore a white dress, and, as was the fashion of the moment, a large black hat shadowed with ostrich-feathers. Once more on seeing her he had a startled impression of looking upon an ethereal creature, a being somehow totally distinct from other beings; and for lack of some more appropriate name, he called her again in his mind "Undine." As the talk, which Cyril Meres had a genius for making general, became more animated, he half lost that impression in one of a very clever, charming woman, with a bright wit sailing lightly over depths of knowledge to which he was unaccustomed in her sex.
The party was not intended to number more than eight persons, of whom Lady Thomson was one, and they sat down seven. When Sir Cyril observed: "We won't wait any longer for Davison," Mildred was too much interested in Goring's presence to inquire who this Davison might be.
She sparkled on half through luncheon to the delight of every one but Miss Ormond the actress, who would have preferred to play the lead herself. Then came a pause. A door was opened at the far end of the dim room, and the missing guest appeared. Sir Cyril rose hastily to greet him. He advanced without any apologetic hurry in his gait; the same impassive Maxwell Davison as before, but leaner, browner, more silver-headed from three more years of wandering under Oriental suns. Mildred could hardly have supposed it possible that the advent of any human being could have given her so disagreeable a sensation.
Sir Cyril was unaware that she knew Maxwell Davison; surprised to hear that he was a cousin of Stewart's, between whom and himself there existed a mutual antipathy, expressing itself in terms of avoidance. His own acquaintance with Davison was recent and in the way of business. He had had the fancy to build for the accommodation of his Hellenic treasures a room in imitation of the court of a Græco-Roman house which he had helped to excavate in Asia Minor. He had commissioned Davison to buy him hangings for it to harmonize with an old Persian carpet in cream color and blue of which he was already possessed. Davison had brought these with him and a little collection of other things which he thought Meres might care to look at. He did not know the Stewarts had moved to London, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find himself seated at the same table with Mildred; he had not forgotten, still less forgiven, the lure of her coquetry, the insult of her rebuff.
Lady Thomson was next him and questioned him exhaustively about his book on Persian Literature and the travels of his lifetime. Miss Ormond took advantage of Mrs. Stewart's sudden silence to talk to the table rather cleverly around the central theme of herself. Goring conversed apart with Mrs. Stewart.
Coffee was served in the shrine which Sir Cyril had reared for his Greek collection, of which the gem was a famous head of Aphrodite—an early Aphrodite, divine, removed from all possible pains and agitations of human passion. The room was an absurdity on Campden Hill, said some, but undeniably beautiful in itself. The columns, of singular lightness and grace, were of a fine marble which hovered between creamy white and faint yellow, and the walls and floor were of the same tone, except for a frieze on a Greek model, very faintly colored, and the old Persian carpet. In fine summer weather the large skylight covering the central space was withdrawn, and such sky as London can show looked down upon it. The new hangings which Maxwell Davison had brought with him were already displayed on a tall screen, and his miscellaneous collection of antiquities, partly sent from Durham College, partly lately acquired, were arranged on a marble bench.
"I shouldn't have brought these things, Sir Cyril," he said; "if I'd known Mrs. Stewart was here. She's got a way of hinting that my most cherished antiquities are forgeries; and the worst of it is, she makes every one believe her, including myself."
Mildred protested.
"I don't pretend to know anything about antiquities, Mr. Davison. I'm sure I never suspected you of a forgery, and if I had, I hope I shouldn't have been rude enough to tell you so."