Whilst she watched the particles of dust floating before the brilliant chink she heard a carriage and horses stop opposite the front of the house.  Afterwards came the rustle of a lady’s skirts down the corridor, and into the room communicating with the one Cytherea occupied.

The golden line vanished in parts like the phosphorescent streak caused by the striking of a match; there was the fall of a light footstep on the floor just behind it:  then a pause.  Then the foot tapped impatiently, and ‘There’s no one here!’ was spoken imperiously by a lady’s tongue.

‘No, madam; in the next room.  I am going to fetch her,’ said the attendant.

‘That will do—­or you needn’t go in; I will call her.’

Cytherea had risen, and she advanced to the middle door with the chink under it as the servant retired.  She had just laid her hand on the knob, when it slipped round within her fingers, and the door was pulled open from the other side.

2.  Four o’clock

The direct blaze of the afternoon sun, partly refracted through the crimson curtains of the window, and heightened by reflections from the crimson-flock paper which covered the walls, and a carpet on the floor of the same tint, shone with a burning glow round the form of a lady standing close to Cytherea’s front with the door in her hand.  The stranger appeared to the maiden’s eyes—­fresh from the blue gloom, and assisted by an imagination fresh from nature—­like a tall black figure standing in the midst of fire.  It was the figure of a finely-built woman, of spare though not angular proportions.

Cytherea involuntarily shaded her eyes with her hand, retreated a step or two, and then she could for the first time see Miss Aldclyffe’s face in addition to her outline, lit up by the secondary and softer light that was reflected from the varnished panels of the door.  She was not a very young woman, but could boast of much beauty of the majestic autumnal phase.

‘O,’ said the lady, ‘come this way.’  Cytherea followed her to the embrasure of the window.

Both the women showed off themselves to advantage as they walked forward in the orange light; and each showed too in her face that she had been struck with her companion’s appearance.  The warm tint added to Cytherea’s face a voluptuousness which youth and a simple life had not yet allowed to express itself there ordinarily; whilst in the elder lady’s face it reduced the customary expression, which might have been called sternness, if not harshness, to grandeur, and warmed her decaying complexion with much of the youthful richness it plainly had once possessed.

She appeared now no more than five-and-thirty, though she might easily have been ten or a dozen years older.  She had clear steady eyes, a Roman nose in its purest form, and also the round prominent chin with which the Caesars are represented in ancient marbles; a mouth expressing a capability for and tendency to strong emotion, habitually controlled by pride.  There was a severity about the lower outlines of the face which gave a masculine cast to this portion of her countenance.  Womanly weakness was nowhere visible save in one part—­the curve of her forehead and brows—­there it was clear and emphatic.  She wore a lace shawl over a brown silk dress, and a net bonnet set with a few blue cornflowers.