* * * * *

The rooms of the French Embassy were already crowded.  An ambassador, short, stout, and somewhat morose, his plain features and snub nose emerging with difficulty from his thick, fair hair, superabundant beard, and mustache—­with an elegant and smiling ambassadress, personifying amid the English crowd that Paris from which through every fibre she felt herself a pining exile—­received the guests.  The scene was ablaze with uniforms, for the Speaker had been giving a dinner, and Royalty was expected.  But, as Lady Tranmore perceived at once, very few members of the House of Commons were present.  A hot debate on some detail of the naval estimates had been sprung on ministers, and the whips on each side had been peremptorily keeping their forces in hand.

“I don’t see either William or Kitty,” said Mary, after a careful scrutiny not, in truth, directed to the discovery of the Ashes.

“No.  I suppose William was kept, and Kitty did not care to come alone.”

Mary said nothing.  But she was well aware that Kitty was never restrained from going into society by the mere absence of her husband.  Meanwhile Lady Tranmore was lost in secret anxieties as to what might have happened in Hill Street.  Had there been a quarrel?  Something certainly had gone wrong, or Kitty would be here.

“Lady Kitty not arrived?” said a voice, like a macaw’s, beside her.

Elizabeth turned and shook hands with Lady Parham.  That extraordinary woman, followed everywhere by the attentive observation of the crowd, had never asserted herself more sharply in dress, manner, and coiffure than on this particular evening—­so it seemed, at least, to Lady Tranmore.  Her ample figure was robed in the white satin of a bride, her wrinkled neck disappeared under a weight of jewels, and her bright chestnut wig, to which the diamond tiara was fastened, positively attacked the spectator, so patent was it and unashamed.  Unashamed, too, were the bold, tyrannous eyes, the rouge-spots on either cheek, the strength of the jaw, the close-shut ability of the mouth.  Elizabeth Tranmore looked at her with a secret passion of dislike.  Her English pride of race, no less than the prejudices of her taste and training, could hardly endure the fact that, for William’s sake, she must make herself agreeable to Lady Parham.

Agreeable, however, she tried to be.  Kitty had seemed to her tired in the afternoon, and had, no doubt, gone to bed—­so she averred.

Lady Parham laughed.

“Well, she mustn’t be tired the night of my party next week—­or the skies will fall.  I never took so much trouble before about anything in my life.”

“No, she must take care,” said Lady Tranmore.  “Unfortunately, she is not strong, and she does too much.”

Lady Parham threw her a sharp look.

“Not strong?  I should have thought Lady Kitty was made on wires.  Well, if she fails me, I shall go to bed—­with small-pox.  There will be nothing else to be done.  The Princess has actually put off another engagement to come—­she has heard so much of Lady Kitty’s reciting.  But you’ll help me through, won’t you?”