Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and bosom.  Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern.  On her hands and bosom a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain.

“Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?” she enquired.

Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat down at the foot of the long couch.  “I am the same—­always the same,” she answered in her cold, reserved voice.

“You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?”

“I went down in the yard as usual.  Laura,” she looked desperately around, “is that Rosa who has just come in?” As she paused a knock came at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne—­the eldest, the richest and the most eccentric of the sisters.

From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world.  She had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure.  As the wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugenie, and again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople, she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel stores a hollow in his tree with nuts.  Life had taught her that the one infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.  Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual flutter of speech—­a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat, round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet.  Her face was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

“My dear Angela,” she now asked in her excited tones, “have you really been walking about again?  I lay awake all night fearing that you had over-taxed your strength yesterday.  Mrs. Francis Barnes—­you never knew her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace’s—­died quite suddenly, without an instant’s warning, after having walked rapidly twice up and down the room.  Since then I have always looked upon movement as a very dangerous thing.”