“Ah, you’re fresh home,” said Delafield, laughing.  “But let’s just try to keep you here—­”

“My dear fellow, who is that at the top of the stairs?”

The old diplomat paused.  In front of the pair some half a dozen guests were ascending, and as many coming down.  At the top stood a tall lady in black, receiving and dismissing.

Delafield looked up.

“That is Mademoiselle Le Breton,” he said, quietly.

“She receives?”

“She distributes the guests.  Lady Henry generally establishes herself in the back drawing-room.  It doesn’t do for her to see too many people at once.  Mademoiselle arranges it.”

“Lady Henry must indeed be a good deal more helpless that I remember her,” murmured Sir Wilfrid, in some astonishment.

“She is, physically.  Oh, no doubt of it!  Otherwise you won’t find much change.  Shall I introduce you?”

They were approaching a woman whose tall slenderness, combined with a remarkable physiognomy, arrested the old man’s attention.  She was not handsome—­that, surely, was his first impression?  The cheek-bones were too evident, the chin and mouth too strong.  And yet the fine pallor of the skin, the subtle black-and-white, in which, so to speak, the head and face were drawn, the life, the animation of the whole—­were these not beauty, or more than beauty?  As for the eyes, the carriage of the head, the rich magnificence of hair, arranged with an artful eighteenth-century freedom, as Madame Vigee Le Brun might have worn it—­with the second glance the effect of them was such that Sir Wilfrid could not cease from looking at the lady they adorned.  It was an effect as of something over-living, over-brilliant—­an animation, an intensity, so strong that, at first beholding, a by-stander could scarcely tell whether it pleased him or no.

“Mademoiselle Le Breton—­Sir Wilfrid Bury,” said Jacob Delafield, introducing them.

“Is she French?” thought the old diplomat, puzzled.  “And—­have I ever seen her before?”

“Lady Henry will be so glad!” said a low, agreeable voice.  “You are one of the old friends, aren’t you?  I have often heard her talk of you.”

“You are very good.  Certainly, I am an old friend—­a connection also.”  There was the slightest touch of stiffness in Sir Wilfrid’s tone, of which the next moment he was ashamed.  “I am very sorry to hear that Lady Henry has grown so much more helpless since I left England.”

“She has to be careful of fatigue.  Two or three people go in to see her at a time.  She enjoys them more so.”

“In my opinion,” said Delafield, “one more device of milady’s for getting precisely what she wants.”

The young man’s gay undertone, together with the look which passed between him and Mademoiselle Le Breton, added to Sir Wilfrid’s stifled feeling of surprise.

“You’ll tell her, Jacob, that I’m here?” He turned abruptly to the young man.