painter.  My dad recommended Praddy as a master.  He worked in the Praed studio, but got the chuck over some foolery.  Then as he couldn’t face his poor old Governor, he enlisted in the Bechuanaland Border police, came out to South Africa and got let in for this show.  The doctors and nurses give him about a month and he doesn’t know it.  He can’t talk much owing to his jaw being tied up—­usually he writes me messages, all about going home and being a good boy, turning over a new leaf, and so on.  I suppose the last person you ever see nowadays is the Revd.  Sam Gardner?  You know they howked him out of Woodcote?  He got “preferment” as he calls it, and a cure of souls at Margate.  Rather rough on the dear old mater—­bless her, always—­She so liked the Hindhead country.  But if you run up against Praddy you might let him know and he might get into touch with Vavasour Williams’s people—­twig?—­F.G.

Vivie rose to her feet half-way through this letter and finished it standing by the window.

She was tall—­say, five feet eight; about twenty-five years of age; with a well-developed, athletic figure, set off by a smart, tailor-made gown of grey cloth.  Yet although she might be called a handsome woman she would easily have passed for a good-looking young man of twenty, had she been wearing male costume.

Her brown-gold hair was disposed of with the least ostentation possible and with no fluffiness.  Her eyebrows were too well furnished for femininity and nearly met when she frowned—­a too frequent practice, as was the belligerent look from her steely grey eyes with their beautiful Irish setting of long dark lashes.  She had a straight nose and firm rounded chin, a rather determined look about the mouth—­lower lip too much drawn in as if from perpetual self-repression.  But all this severity disappeared when she smiled and showed her faultless teeth.  The complexion was clear though a little tanned from deliberate exposure in athletics.  Altogether a woman that might have been described as “jolly good-looking,” if it had not been that whenever any man looked at her something hostile and forbidding came into the countenance, and the eyebrows formed an angry bar of hazel-brown above the dark-lashed eyes.  But her “young man” look won for her many a feminine friendship which she impatiently repelled; for sentimentality disgusted her.

The door of the partners’ room opened and in walked Honoria Fraser.  She was probably three years older than Vivie and likewise a well-favoured woman, a little more matronly in appearance, somewhat after the style of a married actress who really loves her husband and has preserved her own looks wonderfully, though no one would take her for less than twenty-eight.

At the sight of her, Vivie lost her frown and tossed the letter on to the bureau.

Honoria Fraser had been lunching with friends in Portland Place.