“I asked that question before I had seen you.”

“Of whom?” said Helena eagerly.  “You didn’t see anybody but Cousin Philip before I arrived.  Tell me, Lucy—­tell me at once.”

Mrs. Friend kept a smiling silence for a minute.  At last she said—­“Lord Buntingford showed me a portrait of you before you arrived.”

“A portrait of me?  There isn’t one in the house!  Lucy, you deceiver, what do you mean?”

“I was taken to see one in the hall.”

A sudden light dawned on Helena.

“The Romney?  No!  And I’ve been showing it to everybody as the loveliest thing going!”

“There—­you see!”

Helena’s face composed itself.

“I don’t know why I should be flattered.  She was a horrid minx.  That no doubt was what the likeness consisted in!”

Mrs. Friend laughed, but said nothing.  Helena rose from the grass, pausing to say as she turned towards the house: 

“We’re going to dance in the drawing-room, Mawson says.  They’ve cleared it.”

“Doesn’t it look nice?”

Helena assented.  “Let me see—­” she added slowly—­“this is the third dance, isn’t it, since I came?”

“Yes—­the third.”

“I don’t think we need have another”—­the tone was decided, almost impatient—­“at least when this party’s over.”

Mrs. Friend opened her eyes.

“I thought you liked to dance every week-end?”

“Well—­ye-es—­amongst ourselves.  I didn’t mean to turn the house upside-down every week.”

“Well, you see—­the house-parties have been so large.  And besides there have been neighbours.”

“I didn’t ask them,” said Helena.  “But—­we won’t have another—­till we go to Town.”

“Very well.  It might be wise.  The servants are rather tired, and if they give warning, we shall never get any more!”

Mrs. Friend watched the retreating figure of Helena.  There had indeed been a dizzy succession of week-end parties, and it seemed to her that Lord Buntingford’s patience under the infliction had been simply miraculous.  For they rarely contained friends of his own; his lameness cut him off from dancing; and it had been clear to Lucy Friend that in many cases Helena’s friends had been sharply distasteful to him.  He was, in Mrs. Friend’s eyes, a strange mixture as far as social standards were concerned.  A boundless leniency in some cases; the sternest judgment in others.

For instance, a woman he had known from childhood had lately left her husband, carried off her children, and joined her lover.  Lord Buntingford was standing, stoutly by her, helping her in her divorce proceedings, paying for the education of the children, and defending her whenever he heard her attacked.  On the other hand, his will had been iron in the matter of Lord Donald, whose exposure as co-respondent in the particularly disreputable case had been lately filling the newspapers.  Mrs. Friend had seen Helena take up the Times on one of the days on which the evidence in this case had appeared, and fling it down again with a flush and a look of disgust.  But since the day of the Dansworth riot, she had never mentioned Lord Donald’s name.