herself and having read it openly, she turned it again in the direction of Mr. Macpherson.

"It will show him," she observed to herself, "how absurd at my age I think all that sort of thing."

At

But when Mr. Macpherson at last rose to go to his chambers to dress, Miss Crawley took herself very seriously to task. Mr. Beamish was coming to dinner, and she had asked her niece to "make a fourth" at the table. dinner she would certainly be protected, but almost she began to wonder if it were quite right or the safe thing for ladies to receive men callers alone. Up till now her drawing-room had been a place of notorious respectability, and she had frequently said, when discussing the matter of unprotected females, that in the matter of propriety it was in a woman's hands to decide what treatment she should receive. Mr. Macpherson's behavior had upset all her calculations.

She wondered if she ought to tell Tom.

Of course that was impossible, an unheard-of suggestion, but everyone knew that she and Tom-well, of course one owed something to the man who had been so faithful these many years. Miss Crawley's gentle heart was filled with a sense of duty almost like a wife's that she owed him. Perhaps it would be time to confess to him later on what had happened this afternoon. She would like to go to him when the Happy Ending came, without a stain upon her conscience. Meanwhile, all the old pleasure in Mr. Macpherson's society was over. She would have preferred not to meet him again for some time, even although she could find no intentional fault in herself for what had occurred.

Willie had done something in a fit of dreamy abstraction, and the whole thing had been so sudden! She took herself to task, asking in amazement what she could have been thinking of

to allow it. But, positively, she had not been to blame! Really and truly he must have acted in a fit of absentmindedness; that was her great consolation, but how would the story sound suppose anyone were to hear about it, and what would Bodnim have thought if he had come in unannounced a few minutes earlier?

Worse still, what would her nieces have thought?

They had always respected her, and she had tried to be an example to them. One of the rewards of her blameless life was to be able to say to them that she had never written a letter to any man which she might not leave lying about, and had always been treated with respect even by the most ardent lover.

"If it had come from any other person but Willie Macpherson," said the unhappy lady to herself as she dressed for dinner, "I should have been less surprised." She wondered if Perry noticed the heightened color in her cheeks, and to explain it she said in a conversational way while her hair was being done, that it was unusually hot for the time of year. She knew Perry was engaged to Forty across the way, but she had never for a moment had the indelicacy even to wonder how their courtship was conducted. Now she began to ask herself if Perry and Forty kissed each other when they met—if so, in what secluded spot? She had sometimes met them walking in the Park, and they had always looked decorous enough. Certainly Perry had always avoided her eye, but she had believed that to be an evidence of good manners, etiquette not yet having invented any salutation between a nod and a courtesy. When she took off her rings to wash her hands she looked to see if the kiss had left any mark upon them.

It was horribly difficult to go downstairs and meet Mr. Macpherson.

"The girls," she said to herself, "may laugh at me about chaperonage, but one never knows what may happen!"

Jacquetta was the niece chosen for the present occasion, because she might understand the lecture where another less highly educated girl would not. She arrived in her usual shabby clothes, and ran upstairs to her aunt's room to run a comb through her abundant hair.

She looked round the pretty room, and it occurred to her to remark, "I often wonder if you are dull, Aunt Julia!"

If Jacquetta only knew!

Julia blushed, and then a queer sense came to her as of being one with youth and not outside it, not always looking on at the love affairs of others and sympathizing with them but acting them. Her eyes waked to wonder as she saw herself the object of absorbing interest to another human being, and that human being a man. In a turmoil she told herself sharply that William's salute was chaste enough. In any other country but England it would have been as ordinary as saying "Good morning." It was almost indelicate to put any other interpretation on it. Not knowing whether she was satisfied with this explanation or not, she took Jacquetta's arm and went down to the drawingroom.

Tom arrived first. He was always a tower of strength, and she blessed Providence that she had him with her. Her sensitive conscience began to view the affair of this afternoon in a more serious manner, as she looked round at her sumptuous drawing-room with its pretty furnishings. In how far really did she differ from those women who had episodes within the closed doors of their romantic morning-rooms? She felt particularly humble before Jacquetta, to whom in her difficult and dangerous rôle of writer she had sometimes ventured diffidently to give a little advice. Later, as her uneasi

ness grew, she began contrasting the woman who had lived in these rooms before this afternoon with the one who waited in them now, and she said to herself that nothing in this world was so valuable, nothing was so comfortable, as a good reputation-not only in the eyes of the world but for oneself. No amusement that was offered; no liberty that one might enjoy; nothing that one did was worth its destruction or its injury. She reflected on the Julia Crawley of yesterday and envied her. She was a woman, the fair sheet of whose life had never had written upon it a word that could offend. With a naïve simplicity she said to herself that self-respect and the peace that goes with it are worth any purchase.

Realizing at last that she was indulging in an exaggerated view of the event of the afternoon and an almost self-indulgent sense of mortification, she took herself to task for over-prudery, and began to sparkle at Tom, while Jacquetta, following the family habit of isolating the two whenever possible, requested leave to go into the morningroom and speak on the telephone.

Almost she wished to detain her niece. Mr. Macpherson should see for himself that she always had ladies with her, but she could think of no excuse for preventing Jacquetta using the telephone, and besides, she reflected that three persons in the room would make anything in the form of a tête-à-tête with Mr. Macpherson impossible.

Trying to see the matter from a detached point of view, she imagined as an impossible hypothesis telling her nieces about it and wondering what they would say. Jim was accustomed to foreign travel, and probably had had her hands kissed scores of times, and Jack, she knew, would say in her abrupt way, "It's much less disgusting than kissing people on the lips."

But what she would be able to tell neither of them was this, that Mr. Macpherson had kissed her as though he meant it.

it

Nevertheless, when he was announced by Bodnim-unconscious Bodnim, who still believed his mistress to be a woman of character-nothing restored her so quickly as Willie's habitual abstraction of manner. She thought she had almost forgotten for a moment how absent-minded he always was. His face was unaltered; it had no hot flush upon as hers had. His very kindly gray eyes looked troubled with the thought of the speech in front of him, and he clutched an enormous roll of notes nervously. The notes were written on scraps of paper and old envelopes, and some of them were typewritten, and some in pencil and some in blue chalk. He put the heap on a table as he came in, and laid a book upon them to keep them flat, and remarked, "I must not forget these."

He was the normal Willie again. Miss Crawley wondered for one brief moment if she were disappointed.

The little party of four drove to the Royal Institution in Miss Crawley's sumptuous motor car, gray-lined, highly varnished, and with two well-dressed servants seated in front. Tom looked anxiously at his friend, and forgot his own discomfort in sitting on one of the small seats of the motor-a thing which he detested and for which he was far too fat-and in keeping his eye upon the speaker. He used the sporting language of long ago in order to rally him, and it was he who prevented Mr. Macpherson, just before setting out, from drinking a large glass of brandy, a thing which he knew would fly instantly to the professor's head.

"You won't be able to utter if you drink that," he said, putting temptation out of Willie's reach.

"I shan't be able to 'utter' in any case," the unhappy man replied. "There's a big table in front of you, you know, Tom, and a man with a long wand behind, and that's not the worst of it. There are people in front who clap, and there's not much air."

Tom knew he was seeing hobgoblins, and gave him a severe lecture. In the car his manner became so full of kindly affection and protection that Jacquetta told herself, smiling, that he would soon take Mr. Macpherson's hand or pat it.

Tom saw the smile and resented it, being perfectly aware how much he himself was fussing, and how ill and scared the professor looked.

"Oh, you are accustomed to big audiences of course!" he said, rapping out the words as though big audiences

were a crime.

"I glory in them," said the young lady modestly. "I think even the stuffiness of a hall suits me. I love the upward flare of the lamps and the packed rows of seats. I don't believe I enjoy a meeting now unless I'm on the same side as the footlights."

"You are lucky in not being shy, Jacquetta," said Miss Crawley.

"Oh, but you miss all the poetry of it when you allow yourself to be shy," the girl went on-"the sea of upturned faces, the magnetism of crowds, the electric thrill between you and those who listen, oh! and the grand feeling that one has that one is clasping hands with humanity, getting at their hearts and minds and finding out their hearts and minds for them! Do you think I am going to miss all that joy and spoil it all by saying to myself, 'I'm a woman and I ought not to be on a platform-I am shy!'"

Mr. Macpherson had not heard a word that she had said; he had again begun to mumble his lecture. But Tom nudged him and said, "Did you hear that, Willie?"

He spared his companions the dissertation upon what women should do and should not do which they evidently expected, and Miss Crawley, who knew how pronounced his feelings were on this subject, was able to appreciate the restraint he exhibited.

Mr. Macpherson remarked that the .motor car was traveling at an unusual speed, and Miss Crawley looked at a little clock inside the carriage and said soothingly that she believed they would only just arrive in good time. Her own nerves had been partly restored by her vis-à-vis's obvious uneasiness. Once more the event of the afternoon declined in her thoughts to a very ordinary courtesy. Willie had been touched for a moment by something which she had said, and had signified his appreciation of it by this graceful, if oldfashioned tribute. Faltering between her natural desire to be interesting and her positive determination to be respectable, Miss Crawley alighted from the motor car and entered the Royal Institution.

Even Tom's voice was lowered as he told the footman, to whom Miss Crawley had forgotten to give orders, to return at ten o'clock. His manner conveyed the insinuation, "You will be expected to take us home if we are spared." The footman's "Very good, sir," was reassuring, and Mr. Beamish determined to bear up for poor Willie Macpherson's sake.

The mean, semi-circular building, where for many years the greatest scientific discoveries of the world have been introduced, was crowded and very hot.

"He said," said Miss Crawley to herself, "that the normal man doesn't think. Perhaps that is why in England we spend so little money on the Royal Institution." Following on this, she thought how slow was evolution in these matters. "But at least," she said to herself, "we are going to hear

him in some degree of comfort, and certainly in safety instead of seeing him burned at the stake. Which is some consolation."

Tom escorted her to her seat with a certain air of importance which became him. No one enjoyed going out more than Tom Beamish: he was always at his best in evening clothes, with a coat over his arm and a crush hat in his hand, going to some social function. Miss Crawley was delightful to take anywhere. She entered a room quietly, always found her seat without a fuss, and had a courteous word for those people already in their places whom she had to disturb. She was invariably in good time, and without being burdened with useless fans and bags, she seemed to have just the right things with her, and in a small compass. There was a diamond-mounted watch on her wrist, and a little pair of enamel opera glasses in her hand. Her opera cloak was rich and heavy, and her hair was, as usual, beautifully dressed. In almost any throng Julia Crawley might have been picked out distinctively from everyone else by her beautifully dressed hair.

She threw off her velvet wrap, disclosing her plain satin evening dress trimmed with costly lace. Her long gray gloves covering a shapely hand, were unsoiled and fitted exquisitely, and her courtesy, which extended to the public as well as to individuals, always prevented her wearing any ornament in her hair which might cause annoyance to those who sat behind her.

Tom had once said, àpropos of the two handsome Miss Crawleys, "By Jove! those two girls don't want any drilling!"

To spend a day with them in any circumstances was to spend a day with women who never made mistakes, who were never loud or impolite, who could acknowledge a courtesy gracefully, and who paid, a little extravagantly per

haps, but always with fastidious punctuality, for everything which they bought. Tom could not have taken the best woman in the world to a theatre if she had eaten sweets or drunk lemonade during the performance, and he thought it savored of provincialism to carry

home a program. cases, of course, and not likely to occur in civilized society. Still, it was amazing how people transgressed its unwritten laws. He knew there were men who took enthusiastic girls with lownecked morning dresses to Queen's Hall Concerts, but these formed a world which he had never entered nor wanted to enter.

Those were extreme

"In course of time," said Jacquetta to herself, "he will, by a process of exhaustion, have eliminated every woman in the world from his acquaintance except my mother and Aunt Julia, and as he can't marry Mamma, he will be found in Chapter Twenty escorting a gray-haired bride to the altar while everyone else will be wondering why he did not do it twenty years earlier."

Nine o'clock struck, and a private door leading to some unknown chamber at the back of the great table that ran transwise across the theatre opened, and a small bodyguard of gentlemen, all with white hair or bald heads, entered with the professor and found their seats on one of the lower benches.

"I

"They are all gray-headed or bald," commented Jacquetta inwardly. suppose people don't take to science till everything else has palled a little; or does it take all one's life to know anything?"

Mr. Macpherson advanced towards the table, established himself behind it, and produced his immense bundle of notes from the depths of his coat-tail pockets. The lights in the hall were turned down, except where they shone upon the speaker and his table which was covered with electric appliances, retorts, bottles and wires, and all the

other paraphernalia of a scientific lecture. Willie Macpherson's hair was not gray, but very thin and fine and yellow. In the strong light from the reading lamp it looked something like a nimbus round his head. It heightened a certain air of spirituality which his face possessed; his delicately chiseled nose was refined, if too sensitive, and his eyes had something of the clearness of a child's. His side-whiskers seemed to heighten the distinction and the simplicity of his appearance, and Miss Crawley asked herself if this could be the man of this afternoon.

Mr. Macpherson arranged his papers and cleared his throat. Subsequently he arranged his papers and cleared his throat a second time. He did not know whether the room was black about him, or whether it was only his fancy. He saw rows of pink faces and rows of white or bald heads, and he saw the table in front of him. Sometimes he thought the table and the audience changed places, and that he saw the pink faces much nearer than he saw the retorts and bottles. At other times the two were simply a confused mass, like a photograph on a plate which has been inadvertently used twice. He heard some cheering, and when that had died down he believed it was time to begin. He tried to remember whether it was the envelope marked No. I in blue chalk or the typewritten sheet, also marked No. I in red, which should come first. He began with the typewritten one because it was the easiest to read, and when he had got half way through it he knew for a certainty that he ought to have begun with the blue chalked one, but he determined to proceed as he had started. Once, when two or three people entered late, he looked cross, although as a matter of fact he had not consciously heard them enter, and he began to read more rapidly. An attendant handed him a wand and placed a little clicking instrument in