“I know a friend of yours, Mr. Lashmar,—­Mrs. Woolstan.  Perhaps she has spoken to you of me?”

“She has,” Dyce replied, remembering now that it was from Mrs. Woolstan he had heard her name.

“Why, how’s that?” exclaimed the hostess.  “You never told me about it, Mr. Lashmar.”

Dyce had much ado to conceal his annoyed embarrassment.  He wondered whether Mrs. Woolstan had made known the fact of his tutorship, which he did not care to publish, preferring to represent himself as having always held an independent position.  With momentary awkwardness he explained that Mrs. Toplady’s name had but once casually passed Mrs. Woolstan’s Tips in his hearing, and that till now he had forgotten the circumstance.

“I saw her yesterday,” said the lady of the roguish lips.  “She’s in trouble about parting with her little boy—­just been sent to school.”

“Ah—­yes.”

“Very sweet face, hasn’t she?  Is the child like her?  I never saw him—­perhaps you never did, either?”

Mrs. Toplady had a habit, not of looking steadily at an interlocutor, but of casting a succession of quick glances, which seemed to the person thus inspected much more searching than a fixed gaze.  Though vastly relieved by the assurance that Mrs. Woolstan had used discretion concerning him, Dyce could not become at ease under that restless look:  he felt himself gauged and registered, though with what result was by no means discernible in Mrs. Toplady’s countenance.  Those eyes of hers must have gauged a vast variety of men; her forehead told of experience and meditation thereon.  Of all the women he could remember, she impressed him as the least manageable according to his method.  Compared with her, Lady Ogram seemed mere ingenuousness and tractability.

“And, pray, who is Mrs. Woolstan?” the hostess was asking, with a rather dry insistence.

“A charming little woman,” replied Mrs. Toplady, sincerity in look and voice.  “I knew her before her marriage, which perhaps was not quite—­but the poor man is dead.  A sister of hers married into my husband’s family.  She plays beautifully, an exquisite touch.”

They were summoned to dinner.  At table it was Mrs. Toplady who led the conversation, but in such a way as to assume no undue prominence, rather she seemed to be all attention to other talk, and, her smile notwithstanding, to listen with the most open-minded interest to whatever was said.  Her manner to Lady Ogram was marked with deference, at times with something like affectionate gentleness; to Miss Bride she paid the compliment of amiable gravity; and towards Lashmar she could not have borne herself more respectfully—­at all events in language—­if he had been a member of the Cabinet; every word which fell from him she found suggestive, illuminative, and seemed to treasure it in her mind.  After dinner, Dyce received from her his cue for drawing-room oratory; he was led into large discourse, and Mrs. Toplady’s eyes beamed the most intelligent sympathy.  None the less did roguery still lurk at the corner of her lips, so that from time to time the philosopher fidgeted a little, and asked himself uneasily what that smile meant.