“What did I tell you?” she said, brimful with delight.  “Just look at Joan!  Is there a girl anywhere who can match her?”

Martin looked down over the balustrade at Joan in the hall below.

“No,” he said slowly.  “Not one whom I have ever seen.”

The little note of melancholy in his voice moved Millie Splay.  She was all kindness in that moment of her triumph.  She turned to Martin Hillyard in commiseration.  “Oh, don’t tell me that you are in love with her too!  I should be so sorry.”

“No, I am not,” Martin Hillyard hastened to reassure her, “not one bit.”

The commiseration died on the instant in Millicent Splay.

“Well, really I don’t see why you shouldn’t be,” she said coldly.  “You will go a long way before you find any one to equal her.”

Her whole attitude demanded of him an explanation of how he dared not to be in love with her darling.

“A very long way,” Martin Hillyard agreed humbly.  “All the way probably.”

Lady Splay was mollified, and went on to her room.  Down in the hall, Harry Luttrell turned to Joan.

“This is going to be a wonderful week for me.”

“I am very glad,” answered Joan, and they went up the stairs side by side.

CHAPTER XXII

JENNY PRASK

“I have put out the blue dress with the silver underskirt, madam,” said Jenny Prask, knowing well that nothing in Stella Croyle’s wardrobe set off so well her dark and fragile beauty.

“Very well, Jenny.”

Stella Croyle answered listlessly.  She was discouraged by her experience of that afternoon.  She had come to Rackham Park, certain of one factor upon her side, but very certain of that.  She would find no competitor, and lo! the invincible competitor, youth, had put on armour against her!  Stella looked in the mirror.  She was thirty, and in the circle within which she moved, thirty meant climbing reluctantly on to the shelf.

“Don’t you think, Jenny, the blue frock makes me look old?”

Jenny Prask laughed scornfully.

“Old, madam!  You!  Just fancy!”

Stella Croyle, living much alone, had made a companion of her maid.  There was nothing of Mrs. Croyle’s history which Jenny Prask did not know, and very few of her hopes and sorrows were hidden from her.

“My gracious me, madam!  There will be nobody to hold a candle to you here!” she said, with a sniff, as she helped Stella to undress.

Stella looked in the glass.  Certainly there was not a line upon the smoothness of her cheeks; her dark hair had lost none of its gloss.  She took her features one by one, and found no trace of change.  Nor, indeed, scrutinised in that way did Stella show any change.  It was when you saw her across a room that you recognised that girlhood had gone, and that there was a woman in the full ripeness of her beauty.