“Her ladyship will be down in a moment,” the maid announced, as she lowered the blind a little more to keep out the last gleam of sunlight.  “If monsieur will be seated.”

Wingate ignored the silent invitation of the voluptuous little settee with its pile of cushions.  He stood instead upon the hearth rug, gazing around him.  The room, in its way, was a revelation.  Josephine, ever since their first meeting at Etaples, had always seemed to him to carry with her a faint suggestion of sadness, which everything in this little apartment seemed to contradict.  The silverpoint etchings upon the wall were of the school of Hellieu, delicate but daring, exquisite in workmanship and design, the last word in the expression of modern life and love.  A study of Psyche, in white marble, fascinated him with its wonderful outline and sense of arrested motion.  The atmosphere appeared to him intensely feminine and yet strange.  He realised suddenly that it contained no knick-knacks,—­nothing, in short, but books and flowers.  Perhaps his greatest surprise, however, came at the opening of the door.  It seemed at first that he was confronted by a stranger.  The woman who entered in a perfectly white gown of some clinging material, with a single row of pearls around her neck, with ringless fingers and plainly coiled hair, seemed like the ghost of her own girlhood.  It was only when she smiled, a smile which, curiously enough, seemed to bring back something of that aging sadness into her face, that he found himself able to readjust his tangled impressions.  Then he realised that she was no longer a girl, that she was indeed a woman, beautiful, graceful, serious, with all the charm of her greater physical and spiritual maturity.

“Please don’t think,” she begged, as she sank into the settee by which he was standing, “that I have inveigled you here under false pretences.  Henry took the trouble to ring me up from the City this morning to say that he should be dining at home—­such an unusual event that I took it for granted it meant a tete-a-tete.—­I don’t quite know why I treat you with such an extraordinary amount of confidence,” she went on, “but I feel that I must and it helps me so much.  A tete-a-tete dinner with my husband would have been insupportable.  I should have had to telephone to Sarah Baldwin if you had not been available.  Sarah would probably have been engaged, and then I should have had to have gone to bed with a headache.”

“You don’t imagine,” he asked, smiling, “that I am disappointed at your husband’s absence?”

“I hope not,” she answered, raising her eyes to his for a moment.

“Let me imitate your adorable frankness,” he begged.  “I hope your husband’s absence this evening is not because he objects to meeting me?”

“Of course not,” she replied wonderingly.  “Why on earth should he object to meeting you?”

“You probably don’t know,” Wingate replied, “that I am in a sort of way the declared enemy of the British and Imperial Granaries—­Phipps’ latest escapade—­of which your husband is a director.”