Valentine’s expression was gay and reassuring.

“I have been entertaining your friend, Julian,” he said.  “But she has been almost inconsolable in your absence.  She was standing up because I was just about to show her the pictures.  But now you are here, we will have tea first instead.  Ah, here is tea.  Miss Bright, do come and sit by the fire, and put your feet on this stool.  We will wait upon you.”

Since the entrance of Julian, his manner had entirely changed.  All the irony, all the mock politeness, had died out of it.  He was now a kind and delicately courteous host, desirous of putting his guests upon good terms and gilding the passing hour with a definite happiness.  Cuckoo Bright seemed struck completely dumb by the transformation.  She took the chair he indicated, mechanically put her feet up on the stool he pushed forward, and with a rather trembling hand accepted a cup of tea.

“Do you take sugar?” Valentine said, bending over her with the sugar-basin.

“No, no,” she said.

“Oh, but I thought you loved sweet things,” Julian interposed.  “Surely—­”

“I won’t have none to-day,” she ejaculated, adding with an endeavour after gentility; “thank you, all the same,” to Valentine.

He offered her some delicious cakes, but she was apparently petrified by the grandeur of her surroundings, or by some hidden sensation of shyness or of shame, and was refusing to eat anything, when Julian came to the rescue.

“Oh, but you must,” he said.  “Have some of these sugar-biscuits.”

She took some from him and began to sip and munch steadily, but still in silence.  Julian began to fear that the festival must be a dire failure, for her obvious and extreme constraint affected him, and he was also seized with an absurd sense of shyness in the presence of Valentine, and, instead of talking, found himself immersed in a boyish anxiety as to Valentine’s attitude of mind towards the girl.  He looked at Cuckoo in the firelight as she mutely ate and drank, and was all at once profoundly conscious of the dreary vulgarity of her appearance, against which even her original prettiness and her present youth fought in vain.  Her hat cast a monstrous shadow upon the wall, a shadow so distorted and appalling that Julian almost grew red as he observed it, and felt that Valentine was probably observing it also.  He wished poor Cuckoo had left the crying scarlet gown at home, and those black lozenges, which were suited to the pavement of the hall of a financier.  Everything she had on expressed a mind such as Valentine must become acquainted with in amazement, and have intercourse with in sorrow.  The pathetic side of this preposterous feathered and bugled degradation he would fail to see.  Julian felt painfully certain of this.  All the details of the woman would offend him, who was so alive to the value of fine details in life.  He must surely be wondering with all his soul how Julian could ever