silk.  This girl, Ishmael saw vaguely, had a pale chubby face like a child, but the long, dark countenance of the other, lit by a smile of recognition, was suddenly familiar to him.  Only—­Judy had become a woman, a thin, rather sad-looking woman, with a melancholy that was not the old effect of tragedy for which her monkey-look and the bistre shadows beneath her eyes had been responsible without any deeper cause.  The monkey-look was there still, but Judy was almost beautiful in spite, or perhaps more truly because, of it.  Ishmael felt her lean, strong hand, ungloved, come into his.

“I knew it was you!” exclaimed Judy in the husky voice he remembered.  “You’ve changed, but only along the lines one would have expected.  Mr. Killigrew can’t come—­not for a day or two.  He told me to tell you he’d try to get down by the end of the week.  May I introduce you to Miss Georgie Barlow?”

Another hand was thrust into his, with a sudden gauche movement that was not without a girlish charm.  Ishmael found himself looking at the pale chubby face, and the only thing he noticed in it was the mouth.  Georgie Barlow stayed in his mind as “the girl with the mouth,” as she frequently did to those who met her even once.  She had a wonderful mouth, and was wont to declare it to be her only feature.  It was not very red, but very tenderly curved, the lips short, flat in modelling and almost as wide at the ends as the centre, which just saved them from being a cupid’s bow.  The corners were deeply indented, tucked in like those of a child.  Not only the lips but the planes of the chin and cheeks immediately around them were good, very tender in colour and curves, with the faint blur of fine golden down to soften them still more.

Such was Georgie Barlow—­a short, rounded little creature, with a bare neck that was not long but delicate, and surrounded by three “creases of Venus” like that of a baby.  Her rather small but frank blue eyes held a boyish look that was intensified by the fact that her hair was cut short after the new fashion in a certain set and brushed almost to her fair eyebrows in a straight fringe in front, while on the nape of her neck it curved in little drake’s tails of soft brown.  The blue beads riding up her neck ruffled the tails like tiny feathers.

Both she in her “artistic” way and Judy in her quiet smartness were very different from the women Ishmael had been seeing of late years—­the dowdy county ladies or Vassie in her splendid flamboyance.  He felt oddly shy with them; the ageing of Judy, so marked and somehow so unexpected—­she had seemed such a child only ten years ago—­made him feel she was as much of a stranger as her little companion, and there was also about her some new quality he could not but feel, a something aloof, a little hard, for all her gentleness of manner.  He had never envisaged her as growing into this self-possessed woman, whose most noticeable quality, had it not been