hint of an accusation.  So much she owed to Lily in return for all that Lily was prepared to abandon.  ‘There is my note,’ she said at last, offering it to her daughter.  ’I did not mean to see it,’ said Lily, ’and, mamma, I will not read it now.  Let it go.  I know you have been good and have not scolded him.’  ’I have not scolded him, certainly,’ said Mrs Dale.  And then the letter was sent.

CHAPTER XXIV

MRS DOBBS BROUGHTON’S DINNER-PARTY

Mr John Eames of the Income-Tax Office, had in three days risen so high in that world that people in the west-end of town, and very respectable people too—­people living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater—­were glad to ask him out to dinner.  Money had been left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified that money.  He was a private secretary, which is in itself a great advance on being a mere clerk.  And he had become the particular intimate friend of an artist who had pushed himself into high fashion during the last year or two—­one Conway Dalrymple, whom the rich English world was beginning to pet and pelt with gilt sugar-plums, and who seemed to take very kindly to petting and gilt sugar-plums.  I don’t know whether the friendship of Conway Dalrymple had not done as much to secure John Eames his position at the Bayswater dinner-tables, as had either the private secretaryship, or the earl’s money; and yet, when they had first known each other, now only two or three years ago, Conway Dalrymple had been the poorer man of the two.  Some chance had brought them together, and they had lived in the same room for nearly two years.  This arrangement had been broken up, and the Conway Dalrymple of these days had a studio of his own, somewhere near Kensington Palace, where he painted portraits of young countesses, and in which he had even painted a young duchess.  It was the peculiar merit of his pictures—­so at least said the art-loving world—­that though the likeness was always good, the stiffness of the modern portrait was never there.  There was also ever some story told in Dalrymple’s pictures over and above the story of the portraiture.  This countess was drawn as a fairy with wings, that countess as a goddess with a helmet.  The thing took for a time, and Conway Dalrymple was picking up his gilt sugar-plums with considerable rapidity.

On a certain day he and John Eames were to dine out together at a certain house in that Bayswater district.  It was a large mansion, if not made of stone yet looking very stony, with thirty windows at least, all of them with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at least four thousand a year for its maintenance.  And its owner, Dobbs Broughton, a man very well known both in the City and over the grass in Northamptonshire, was supposed to have a good deal more than four thousand a year.  Mrs Dobbs Broughton, a very beautiful