Moving quickly towards me with both her hands outstretched, she exclaimed in that honey-soft voice of hers,

“Oh! my dear friend——­” stopped and added, “Why, you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Fossils wear well,” I replied, “but that is just what I was thinking of you.”

“Then it is very rude of you to call me a fossil when I am only approaching that stage.  Oh!  I am glad to see you.  I am glad!” and she gave me both the outstretched hands.

Upon my word I felt inclined to kiss her and have wondered ever since if she would have been very angry.  I am not certain that she did not divine the inclination.  At any rate after a little pause she dropped my hands and laughed.  Then she said,

“I must tell you at once.  A most terrible catastrophe has happened——­”

Instantly it occurred to me that she had forgotten having informed me by letter of all the details of her husband’s death.  Such things chance to people who have once lost their memory.  So I tried to look as sympathetic as I felt, sighed and waited.

“It’s not so bad as all that,” she said with a little shake of her head, reading my thought as she always had the power to do from the first moment we met.  “We can talk about that afterwards.  It’s only that I hoped we were going to have a quiet two days, and now the Atterby-Smiths are coming, yes, in half an hour.  Five of them!”

“The Atterby-Smiths!” I exclaimed, for somehow I too felt disappointed.  “Who are the Atterby-Smiths?”

“Cousins of George’s, his nearest relatives.  They think he ought to have left them everything.  But he didn’t, because he could never bear the sight of them.  You see his property was unentailed and he left it all to me.  Now the entire family is advancing to suggest that I should leave it to them, as perhaps I might have done if they had not chosen to come just now.”

“Why didn’t you put them off?” I asked.

“Because I couldn’t,” she answered with a little stamp of her foot, “otherwise do you suppose they would have been here?  They were far too clever.  They telegraphed after lunch giving the train by which they were to arrive, but no address save Charing Cross.  I thought of moving up to the Berkeley Square house, but it was impossible in the time, also I didn’t know how to catch you.  Oh! it’s most vexatious.”

“Perhaps they are very nice,” I suggested feebly.

“Nice!  Wait till you have seen them.  Besides if they had been angels I did not want them just now.  But how selfish I am!  Come and have some tea.  And you can stop longer, that is if you live through the Atterby-Smiths who are worse than both the Kendah tribes put together.  Indeed I wish old Harut were coming instead.  I should like to see Harut again, wouldn’t you?” and suddenly the mystical look I knew so well, gathered on her face.

“Yes, perhaps I should,” I replied doubtfully.  “But I must leave by the first train on Tuesday morning; it goes at eight o’clock.  I looked it up.”