* * * * *

‘Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of—­the gentleman who lived here?’ She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.

’Why, yes.  It’s in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your own bedroom, ma’am.’

‘No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.’

’Yes, so they are; but he’s behind them.  He belongs rightly to that frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said:  “Cover me up from those strangers that are coming, for God’s sake.  I don’t want them staring at me, and I am sure they won’t want me staring at them.”  So I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily in front of him, as they had no frame, and Royalties are more suitable for letting furnished than a private young man.  If you take ’em out you’ll see him under.  Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it!  He didn’t think the next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you, or he wouldn’t have thought of hiding himself; perhaps.’

‘Is he handsome?’ she asked timidly.

‘I call him so.  Some, perhaps, wouldn’t.’

‘Should I?’ she asked, with eagerness.

’I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very electric flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you’d expect a poet to be who doesn’t get his living by it.’

‘How old is he?’

’Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I think.’

Ella was, as a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but she did not look nearly so much.  Though so immature in nature, she was entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to suspect that last love may be stronger than first love; and she would soon, alas, enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the vainer ones of her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise than with their backs to the window or the blinds half down.  She reflected on Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up.  It came from her husband, who had gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children till dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a serene sense of something ecstatic to come.  For, with the subtle luxuriousness of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on learning that her husband was to be absent that night she had refrained from incontinently rushing upstairs and opening the picture-frame, preferring to reserve the inspection till she could be alone, and a more romantic tinge be imparted to the occasion by silence, candles, solemn sea and stars outside, than was afforded by the garish afternoon sunlight.