The little lady smiled indulgently, recalling her own blue eyes and the mischief they had been known to stir up.

“And now this Widow from Shanghai comes and breaks in on us,” her thoughts proceeded irrelevantly.  “I don’t in the least wish to cultivate her friendship, but I know her kind.  Once she gets her foot in the door there’ll be no shaking her off.”

As a matter of fact, Miss Helen Campbell, spinster, was never very enthusiastic about widows.

“I don’t care for them,” she used to say.  “They are a knowing, designing lot.”

Once when she was asked by a missionary society in West Haven to contribute to a fund for the widows in India, to induce them not to mount their husbands’ funeral pyres and permit themselves to be consumed by mortuary flames, Miss Campbell indignantly refused.

“I am sure, if they are so foolish, that’s much the best place for them,” she announced.  “I prefer to give my money for more worthy causes.”

And now a widow, who, far from having mounted any funeral pyre, appeared to enjoy life immensely, had placed them under obligations.

“She is a slant-eyed widow with a yellow skin,” Miss Campbell thought uncharitably, “and her hair that ought to be dark is light.  Of course that isn’t her fault and neither is her peculiar complexion nor her slant eyes, but I do wish she were one thing or the other and not half and half.”

Of course all these inhospitable and unfriendly notions the little lady was careful to keep to herself.  When presently the Widow of Shanghai rode up in a ’riksha and was helped to alight by three maids at once, Miss Campbell was all graciousness and affability.

Mme. Fontaine wore a beautiful white embroidered crêpe dinner dress.  Her figure was so slender Miss Campbell feared it might sway and bend with the least breath of wind.  Her curious fluffy hair was arranged on top of her head and her only ornament was a string of small pearls wound twice around her throat.  They were very beautiful pearls, each one perfect to the casual eye.

“But then, who can tell the real from the unreal nowadays,” thought Miss Campbell, regarding the jewels critically.  “They might be imitation, every one of them.”

“Reggie” Carlton, as he came to be known to the girls, and Nicholas Grimm soon followed the widow, and after them came Mr. Buxton.  Yoritomo could not appear that evening, because of the celebration in his own home where he must remain and share in the family feast.

Mme. Fontaine was reserved almost to the point of shyness with the four men of the party, whom she now met for the first time.  But she drew the girls around her by a kind of irresistible attraction.  Billie found herself talking as freely as she talked with her three friends.  The widow had a curiously sympathetic way of listening that provoked confidences.  There was a good deal of friendly rivalry among the Motor Maids for her society.  They took turns sitting by her side during the half hour before dinner was announced; but Nancy felt a certain superiority over the others.  Was she not bound by a secret tie to this fascinating person because of their chance meeting in the garden in the rain?