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In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed, and her body stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigor of cast iron. This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily knuckled hands, her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face, which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

“Really,” said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort of military inspection through her nose glasses, “really, I had begun to fear that I had lost you altogether. It’s four years since I saw you at Nice, isn’t it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from you.”

“I was in New York then.”

“It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?”

“Can you ask?” replied MacMaster gallantly.

Lady Mary smiled ironically. “But for what else, incidentally?”

“Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger’s studio and his unfinished picture. Since I’ve been here, I’ve decided to stay the summer. I’m even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him.”

“So that is what brought you to London?”

“Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I came. It’s his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me. The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined.”

“You’ll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,” remarked Lady Mary dryly. “Isn’t there rather a surplus of books on that subject already?”

“Such as they are. Oh, I’ve read them all”–here MacMaster faced Lady Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he added, smiling.

“I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. “We leave that to peoples who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy; and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you’ve come to us in a missionary spirit, we’ll tolerate you politely, but we’ll laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”

“That really doesn’t daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly. “As I told you, I’m a man with a mission.”

Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. “Bravo! And you’ve come to me for inspiration for your panegyric?”

MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”

“I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary judicially. “I can’t understand how she endures to have the wretched affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious about this matter, insofar as her light goes,–which rather puzzles me, as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and you can see her when she returns from Italy.”

“I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.