“Jimmy does, the baby is rather young for tastes of any description,” Rachael answered with an odd, new sense of being somehow sedate and old-fashioned beside this composed young woman.  Miss Clay was not listening.  Her brown eyes were moving idly over the room, and now she suddenly bowed and smiled.

“There’s Greg!” she said.  “What a comfort it is to see a man dress as that man dresses!”

“I’ve been looking for you,” Warren Gregory said, coming up to his wife, and, noticing the other woman, he added enthusiastically:  “Well, Margaret!  I didn’t know you!  Bless my life and heart, how you children grow up!”

“Children!  I’m twenty-two!” Miss Clay said, pouting, with her round brown eyes fixed in childish reproach upon his face.  They had been great friends when Warren was with his mother in Paris, nearly four years ago, and now they fell into an animated recollection of some of their experiences there with the two old ladies.  While they talked Rachael watched Magsie Clay with admiration and surprise.

She knew all the girl’s history, as indeed everybody m the room knew it, but to-day it was a little hard to identify the poised and beautiful young woman who was looking so demurely up from under her dark lashes at Warren with the “little Clay girl” of a few years ago.

Parker Hoyt’s aunt, the magnificent old Lady Frothingham, had been just enough of an invalid for the twenty years preceding her death to need a nurse or a companion, or a social secretary, or someone who was a little of all three.  The great problem was to find the right person, and for a period that actually extended itself over years the right person was not to be found, and the old lady was consequently miserable and unmanageable.

Then came the advent of Mrs. Clay, a dark, silent, dignified widow, who more than met all requirements, and who became a companion figure to the little, fussing, over-dressed old lady.  From the day she first arrived at the Frothingham mansion Mrs. Clay never failed her old employer for so much as a single hour.  For fifteen years she managed the house, the maids, and, if the truth were known, the old lady herself, with a quiet, irresistible efficiency.  But it was early remarked that she did not manage her small daughter with her usual success.  Magsie was a fascinating baby, and a beautiful child, quicker of speech than thought, with a lovely little heart-shaped face framed in flying locks of tawny hair.  But she was unmanageable and strong-willed, and possessed of a winning and insolent charm hard to refuse.

Her mother in her silent, repressed way realized that Magsie was not having the proper upbringing, but her own youth had been hard and dark, and it was perhaps the closest approach to joy that she ever knew when Magsie glowing under her wide summer hats, or radiant in new furs, rushed up to demand something preposterous and extravagant of her mother, and was not denied.