“Oh, Mrs. Holt!” exclaimed Honora, deprecatingly, and blushing very prettily.

“Whatever else I am,” said Mrs. Holt, vigorously, “I am not a flatterer.  I am telling you something for your own good—­which you probably know already.”

Honora was discreetly silent.  She thought of the proud and unsusceptible George Hanbury, whom she had cast down from the tower of his sophomore dignity with such apparent ease; and of certain gentlemen at home, young and middle-aged, who had behaved foolishly during the Christmas holidays.

At lunch both the Roberts and the Joshuas were away.

Afterwards, they romped with the children—­she and Susan.  They were shy at first, especially the third Joshua, but Honora captivated him by playing two sets of tennis in the broiling sun, at the end of which exercise he regarded her with a new-born admiration in his eyes.  He was thirteen.

“I didn’t think you were that kind at all,” he said.

“What kind did you think I was?” asked Honora, passing her arm around his shoulder as they walked towards the house.

The boy grew scarlet.

“Oh, I didn’t think you—­you could play tennis,” he stammered.

Honora stopped, and seized his chin and tilted his face upward.

“Now, Joshua,” she said, “look at me and say that over again.”

“Well,” he replied desperately, “I thought you wouldn’t want to get all mussed up and hot.”

“That’s better,” said Honora.  “You thought I was vain, didn’t you?”

“But I don’t think so any more,” he avowed passionately.  “I think you’re a trump.  And we’ll play again to-morrow, won’t we?”

“We’ll play any day you like,” she declared.

It is unfair to suppose that the arrival of a real vicomte and of a young, good-looking, and successful member of the New York Stock Exchange were responsible for Honora’s appearance, an hour later, in the embroidered linen gown which Cousin Eleanor had given her that spring.  Tea was already in progress on the porch, and if a hush in the conversation and the scraping of chairs is any sign of a sensation, this happened when our heroine appeared in the doorway.  And Mrs. Holt, in the act of lifting the hot-water kettle; put it down again.  Whether or not there was approval in the lady’s delft-blue eye, Honora could not have said.  The Vicomte, with the graceful facility of his race, had differentiated himself from the group and stood before her.  As soon as the words of introduction were pronounced, he made a bow that was a tribute in itself, exaggerated in its respect.

“It is a pleasure, Mademoiselle,” he murmured, but his eyes were more eloquent.

A description of him in his own language leaped into Honora’s mind, so much did he appear to have walked out of one of the many yellow-backed novels she had read.  He was not tall, but beautifully made, and his coat was quite absurdly cut in at the waist; his mustache was en-croc, and its points resembled those of the Spanish bayonets in the conservatory:  he might have been three and thirty, and he was what the novels described as ‘un peu fane’ which means that he had seen the world:  his eyes were extraordinarily bright, black, and impenetrable.