“I am afraid the servants have not told you?” she said.  “Mrs. Delamayn has gone out.”

“I beg your pardon—­I have not called to see Mrs. Delamayn.”

Mrs. Glenarm looked a little surprised.  She went on, however, as amiably as before.

“Mr. Delamayn, perhaps?” she suggested.  “I expect him here every moment.”

Anne explained again.  “I have just parted from Mr. Delamayn.”  Mrs. Glenarm opened her eyes in astonishment.  Anne proceeded.  “I have come here, if you will excuse the intrusion—­”

She hesitated—­at a loss how to end the sentence.  Mrs. Glenarm, beginning by this time to feel a strong curiosity as to what might be coming next, advanced to the rescue once more.

“Pray don’t apologize,” she said.  “I think I understand that you are so good as to have come to see me. You look tired.  Won’t you take a chair?”

Anne could stand no longer.  She took the offered chair.  Mrs. Glenarm resumed her place on the music-stool, and ran her fingers idly over the keys of the piano.  “Where did you see Mr. Delamayn?” she went on.  “The most irresponsible of men, except when he has got his fiddle in his hand!  Is he coming in soon?  Are we going to have any music?  Have you come to play with us?  Mr. Delamayn is a perfect fanatic in music, isn’t he?  Why isn’t he here to introduce us?  I suppose you like the classical style, too?  Did you know that I was in the music-room?  Might I ask your name?”

Frivolous as they were, Mrs. Glenarm’s questions were not without their use.  They gave Anne time to summon her resolution, and to feel the necessity of explaining herself.

“I am speaking, I believe, to Mrs. Glenarm?” she began.

The good-humored widow smiled and bowed graciously.

“I have come here, Mrs. Glenarm—­by Mr. Delamayn’s permission—­to ask leave to speak to you on a matter in which you are interested.”

Mrs. Glenarm’s many-ringed fingers paused over the keys of the piano.  Mrs. Gle narm’s plump face turned on the stranger with a dawning expression of surprise.

“Indeed?  I am interested in so many matters.  May I ask what this matter is?”

The flippant tone of the speaker jarred on Anne.  If Mrs. Glenarm’s nature was as shallow as it appeared to be on the surface, there was little hope of any sympathy establishing itself between them.

“I wished to speak to you,” she answered, “about something that happened while you were paying a visit in the neighborhood of Perth.”

The dawning surprise in Mrs. Glenarm’s face became intensified into an expression of distrust.  Her hearty manner vanished under a veil of conventional civility, drawn over it suddenly.  She looked at Anne.  “Never at the best of times a beauty,” she thought.  “Wretchedly out of health now.  Dressed like a servant, and looking like a lady.  What does it mean?”

The last doubt was not to be borne in silence by a person of Mrs. Glenarm’s temperament.  She addressed herself to the solution of it with the most unblushing directness—­dextrously excused by the most winning frankness of manner.