Melrose smiled.

“Pray take that chair!” he said, with exaggerated deference.  “Your visits are rare, Lady Tatham!  Is it—­twenty years?  I regret I have no drawing-room in which to receive you.  But Mr. Faversham and I talk of furnishing it before long.  You are, I believe, acquainted with Mr. Faversham?”

He waved his hand, and suddenly Victoria became aware of another person in the room.  Faversham standing tall and silent, amid the show of majolica, bowed to her formally, and Victoria slightly acknowledged the greeting.  It seemed to her that Melrose’s foraging eyes travelled maliciously between her and the agent.

“Mr. Faversham and I only unpacked a great part of this stuff yesterday,” said Melrose, with much apparent good humour.  “It has been shut up in one of the north rooms ever since a sale in Paris at which I bought most of the pieces.  Crockett wished to see it” (he named the most famous American collector of the day).  “He shall see it.  I understand he will be here to-morrow, having missed his train to-day.  He will come no doubt with his check-book.  It amuses me to lead these fellows on, and then bid them good morning.  They have the most infernal assumptions.  One has to teach them that an Englishman is a match for any American!”

Victoria sat passive.  Faversham took up a pile of letters and moved toward the door.  As he opened it, he turned and his eyes met Victoria’s.  She wavered a moment under the passionate and haughty resentment they seemed to express, no doubt a reflection of the reply to his letter sent him by Harry that morning.  Then the door shut and she was alone with Melrose.

That gentleman leant back in his chair observing her.  He wore the curious cloaklike garment of thin black stuff, in which for some years past he had been accustomed to dress when indoors; and the skullcap on his silvery white hair gave added force to the still splendid head and aquiline features.  A kind of mocking satisfaction seemed to flicker through the wrinkled face; and the general aspect of the man was still formidable indeed.  And yet it was the phantom of a man that she beheld.  He had paled to the diaphanous whiteness of the Catholic ascetic; his hand shook upon his stick; the folds of the cloak barely concealed the emaciation of his body.  Victoria, gazing at him, seemed to perceive strange intimations and presages, and, in the deep harsh eyes, a spirit at bay.

She began quietly, bending forward: 

“Mr. Melrose, I have come to speak to you on behalf of your wife.”

“So I imagined.  I should not allow any one else, Lady Tatham, to address me on the subject.”

“Thank you.  I resolved—­as you see—­to appeal once more to our old—­”

“Friendship?” he suggested.

“Yes—­friendship,” she repeated, slowly.  “It might have been called so—­once.”

“Long ago!  So long ago that—­I do not see how anything practical can come of appealing to it,” he said, pointedly.  “Moreover, the manner in which the friendship was trampled on—­by you—­not once, but twice, not only destroyed it, but—­if I may say so—­replaced it.”