To-night the long table down the middle was set with a white cloth.  The family from Birmingham had come.  Father and mother, absurd pouter-pigeons swelling and strutting; two putty-faced unmarried daughters, sulking; one married one, pink and proper, and the son-in-law, sharp eyed and bald-headed.  From their table in the centre they stared at her where she dined by herself at her table in the bow.

Two days.  She didn’t think she could bear it one day more.

She could see herself as she came down the room; her knitted silk sport’s coat, bright petunia, flaming; thick black squares of her bobbed hair hanging over eyebrows and ears.  And behind, the four women’s heads turning on fat necks to look at her, reflected.

Gwinnie’s letter was there, stuck up on the mantel-piece.  Gwinnie could come at the week-end; she implored her to hang on for five days longer, not to leave Stow-on-the-Wold till they could see it together.  A letter from Gibson, repeating himself.

The family from Birmingham were going through the door; fat faces straining furtively.  If they knew—­if they only knew.  She stood, reading.

She heard the door shut.  She could look in the glass now and amuse herself by the sight they had stared at.  The white face raised on the strong neck and shoulders.  Soft white nose, too thick at the nuzzling tip.  Brown eyes straight and wide open.  Deep-grooved, clear-cut eyelids, heavy lashes.  Mouth—­clear-cut arches, moulded corners, brooding.  Her eyes and her mouth.  She could see they were strange.  She could see they were beautiful.

And herself, her mysterious, her secret self, Charlotte Redhead.  It had been secret and mysterious to itself once, before she knew.

She didn’t want to be secret and mysterious.  Of all things she hated secrecy and mystery.  She would tell Gwinnie about Gibson Herbert when she came.  She would have to tell her.

Down at the end of the looking-glass picture, behind her, the bow window and the slender back of a man standing there.

* * * * *

She had got him clear by this time.  If he went to-morrow he would stay, moving about forever in your mind.  The young body, alert and energetic; slender gestures of hands.  The small imperious head carried high.  The spare, oval face with the straight-jutting, pointed chin.  Honey-white face, thin dusk and bistre of eyelids and hollow temples and the roots of the hair.  Its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure.  Hair brushed back in two sleek, dark wings.  The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils (it wasn’t Roman after all).  Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled.

Black eyebrows almost meeting, the outer ends curling up queerly, like little moustaches.  And always the hard, blue knife-blade eyes.

She knew his name the first day.  He had told her.  Conway.  John Roden Conway.