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brought memories of that one epoch of her life when she had been aware of a garnered, a conscious happiness. And, as she remembered it, her eyes fell and in her stillness she might have been standing there to have her picture painted, a touch of something gracefully obsolete, for all the modernity of her straight lines and shortened skirts, in the falling sleeves of her black dress, the loose short jacket, the bow of velvet at her throat. Resolutely drawn against the dark background, the lines of her downcast profile were at once gay, impatient and imperative; the lifted upper lip sweet, the lower lip stubborn, the nose a little thick, a little clumsy, like a child’s nose, but with a nostril all delicacy and decision. Her golden hair, twisted round her head, made a brightness in the room. Clive had said that she had the hair of Helen of Troy. He had also said, playing at their game of analogies, that she was like a falcon, a jar of honey, a spray of rosemary; and there was, indeed, an almost vestal fierceness in Monica Wilmott; something high, hovering, and perhaps a little ruthless. Her tresses might be the tresses of Helen, her fair glancing face might allure like the face of a siren over the sea, but her two distant years of marriage had left intact something of girlhood that survived into her middle years, and