“The things you wear really matter.”  Emily was bringing all her powers to bear upon the subject, and with an anxious kindness which was quite angelic.  “Each dress makes you look like another sort of picture.  Have you,”—­contemplatively—­“anything quite different to wear to-night and to-morrow?”

“I have two evening dresses I have not worn here yet”—­a little hesitatingly.  “I—­well I saved them.  One is a very thin black one with silver on it.  It has a trembling silver butterfly for the shoulder, and one for the hair.”

“Oh, put that on to-night!” said Emily, eagerly.  “When you come down to dinner you will look so—­so new!  I always think that to see a fair person suddenly for the first time all in black gives one a kind of delighted start—­though start isn’t the word, quite.  Do put it on.”

Lady Agatha put it on.  Emily Fox-Seton came into her room to help to add the last touches to her beauty before she went down to dinner.  She suggested that the fair hair should be dressed even higher and more lightly than usual, so that the silver butterfly should poise the more airily over the knot, with its quivering, outstretched wings.  She herself poised the butterfly high upon the shoulder.

“Oh, it is lovely!” she exclaimed, drawing back to gaze at the girl.  “Do let me go down a moment or so before you do, so that I can see you come into the room.”

She was sitting in a chair quite near Lord Walderhurst when her charge entered.  She saw him really give something quite like a start when Agatha appeared.  His monocle, which had been in his eye, fell out of it, and he picked it up by its thin cord and replaced it.

“Psyche!” she heard him say in his odd voice, which seemed merely to make a statement without committing him to an opinion—­“Psyche!”

He did not say it to her or to any one else.  It was simply a kind of exclamation,—­appreciative and perceptive without being enthusiastic,—­and it was curious.  He talked to Agatha nearly all the evening.

Emily came to Lady Agatha before she retired, looking even a little flushed.

“What are you going to wear at the treat to-morrow?” she asked.

“A white muslin, with entre-deux of lace, and the gauze garden-hat, and a white parasol and shoes.”

Lady Agatha looked a little nervous; her pink fluttered in her cheek.

“And to-morrow night?” said Emily.

“I have a very pale blue.  Won’t you sit down, dear Miss Fox-Seton?”

“We must both go to bed and sleep.  You must not get tired.”

But she sat down for a few minutes, because she saw the girl’s eyes asking her to do it.

The afternoon post had brought a more than usually depressing letter from Curzon Street.  Lady Claraway was at her motherly wits’ ends, and was really quite touching in her distraction.  A dressmaker was entering a suit.  The thing would get into the papers, of course.