A servant went round lighting lamps.

The first lamp to be lit stood beside Anne’s sofa.  The effect of the illumination was to make the lady in the window turn on her settee.  Across the space between, her eyes, obscure lights in a face still undefined, swept with the turning of her body, and fastened upon Anne’s face, bared for the first time to their view.  They remained fixed, as if Anne’s face had a peculiar fascination for them.

“Who is the lady sitting in the window?” asked Anne.

“It’s my sister.”  Mrs. Ransome blinked as she answered, and her blood ran scarlet to the roots of her blonde hair.

A cherub, discovering a horrible taste in his trumpet, would have looked like Mrs. Hannay.

“Do let me give you some more tea, Mrs. Majendie?” said she, while Mrs. Ransome signalled to her husband.  “Here, Dick, come and make yourself useful.”

Mr. Ransome, a little stout man with a bald head, a pale puffy face, a twinkling eye and a severe moustache, was obedient to her summons.

“Let me see,” said she, “have you met Mrs. Majendie?”

“I have not had that pleasure,” said Mr. Ransome, and bowed profoundly.  He waited assiduously on Mrs. Majendie.  The Ransomes might have been responsible for the whole occasion, they so rallied around and supported her.

Hannay and Gorst, Ransome and another man were gathered together in a communion with the lady of the settee.  There was a general lull, and her voice, a voice of sweet but somewhat penetrating quality, was heard.

“Don’t talk to me,” said she, “about women being jealous of each other.  Do you suppose I mind another woman being handsome?  I don’t care how handsome she is, so long as she isn’t handsome in my style.  Of course, I don’t say I could stand it if she was the very moral of me.”

“I say, supposing Toodles met the very moral of herself?”

“Could Toodles have a moral?  I doubt it.”

“I want to know what she’d do with it.”

“Yes, by Jove, what would you do?”

“Do?  I should do my worst.  I should make her sit somewhere with a good strong light on her.”

“Hold hard there,” said her brother-in-law (the man who called her Toodles), “Lady Cayley doesn’t want that lamp lit just yet”

In the silence of the rest, the name seemed to leap straight across the room to Anne.

The two women beside her heard it, and looked at each other and at her.  Anne sickened under their eyes, struck suddenly by the meaning of their protection and their sympathy.  She longed to rise, to sweep them aside and go.  But she was kept motionless by some superior instinct of disdain.

Outwardly she appeared in no way concerned by this revelation of the presence of Lady Cayley.  She might never have heard of her, for any knowledge that her face betrayed.

Majendie, not far from the settee in the window, was handing cucumber sandwiches to an old lady.  And Lady Cayley had taken the matches from the maid and was lighting the lamp herself, and was saying, “I’m not afraid of the light yet, I assure you.  There—­look at me.”