"I've got a standing invitation, if that's what you mean. Sara gives me a meal ticket, as it were. Nothing extraordinary in my going out whenever I like, is there?" His manner was a trifle offish.

Booth laughed. "In spite of your disagreeable remark, I wish you good luck, old man."

"What the devil are you driving at, Brandy?"

"I only meant to cheer you up a bit, that's all."

"Thanks!"

There was another interval of silence. Leslie furtively studied the face of his friend, who had resumed his dreamy contemplation of the roof of the car, his hands clasped behind his head, his legs outstretched.

"I say, Brandy," he ventured at last, a trace of embarra.s.sment in his manner, "if you've nothing better to do, come down and dine with us to-night--en famille. Viv said over the 'phone this morning that we are dining alone in state. Come along, old chap, and wake us up. What say?"

A clever mind-reader could have laid bare the motive in this cordial, even eager invitation. He was seeking to play Vivian against Hetty in the game, which seemed to have taken on a new turn.

Booth was not a mind-reader, although in jest he had posed as one.

"I'm quite sure I've nothing better to do," he said. "I'd suggest, however, that you let the invitation come from some one in authority.

Your mother, for instance."

"Nonsense," cried the other blithely. "You know you've got a meal ticket at our house, good for a million punches. Still I'll have Vivian call you up this afternoon."

"If she wants me, I'll come," said Booth in the most matter-of-fact way.

Leslie settled down with a secret sigh of relief. He regained his usual loquaciousness. The points of his little moustache resumed their uprightness.

"How do you like Sara?" he asked. It was a casual question, with no real meaning behind it as it was uttered. No sooner had it left his lips, however, than a new and rather staggering idea entered his mind,--a small thing at first but one that grew with amazing swiftness.

"She is splendid," said Booth warmly.

"I thought you'd like her," said Leslie, the idea growing apace: It did not occur to him that he might be nurturing disloyalty to the interests of his own sister. Things of that sort never bothered Leslie. When all was said and done, Vivian had but a slim chance at best, so why champion a faint hope? "Why don't you do a portrait of her? It would be a wonderful thing, old chap."

He sat up a trifle straighter in his chair.

"She hasn't asked me to, which is the best reason in the world.

"Oh, I can fix that." His lively imagination was full of it now.

"Thanks. Don't bother."

"And there's this to be said for a portrait of Sara," went on Leslie, rather too eagerly: "she wouldn't object to having it exhibited in the galleries. 'Gad, it would do you a world of good, Brandy."

The other's eyes narrowed. "I suppose I am to infer that Mrs.

Wrandall courts publicity."

"Not at all," cried the other impatiently. "What I mean is this: she's taken a fancy to you, and if her portrait could be the means of helping you--"

"Oh, cut that out, Les,--cut it out," growled Booth coldly.

"Well, in any event, if you want to paint her, I can fix it for you," announced his companion.

"If you don't mind, old chap, I'll tackle Miss Castleton first,"

said Booth, dismissing the matter with a yawn.

"I hate the word tackle," said Leslie.

On a bright, sunny afternoon two weeks later, Mrs. Redmond Wrandall received her most intimate friend in her boudoir. They were both in ample black. Mrs. Rowe-Martin, it seems, had suffered a recent bereavement--with an aspect of permanency,--in the loss of a four thousand dollar Airdale who had stopped traffic in Fifth Avenue for twenty minutes while a sympathetic crowd viewed his gory remains, and an unhappy but garrulous taxi-cab driver tried to account for his crime. He never even thought of the insanity dodge. The Airdale was given a most impressive funeral and was buried in pomp with all his medals, ribbons, tags, collars and platinum leashes, but minus a few of the uncollected parts of his anatomy. While it had been a complete catastrophe, he was by no means a complete carca.s.s.

Be that as it may, his mistress went into mourning, denying herself so many diversions that not a few of her friends became alarmed and advised her husband to put her in a sanitarium. He was willing, poor chap, but not she. She couldn't see the sense of confining her grief to the four walls of a sanitarium while the four winds of heaven were at her disposal.

The most distressing feature of the great Airdale's taking-off lay in the fact that his descendants--he had several sets of great-grandchildren--appeared to be uncommonly ordinary brutes, without a symptom of good breeding in the lot of them. They were so undeviatingly gauche and middle-cla.s.s, that already the spiteful tongues of envy had begun to question his right to the medals and ribbons acquired at the bench shows, where Mrs. Rowe-Martin was considered one of the immortals. She could have got a blue ribbon on a yellow dog any time. Of course, in defence of her exotic Airdale, she unblinkingly fell back on the paraphrase: "It's a wise father that knows his own son"; or the other way round, just as you please.

Mrs. Rowe-Martin professedly was middle-aged--that is to say, just rounding fifty. As a woman is always fifty until she is sixty, just as it is nine o'clock until the stroke of ten, there may be some question as to which end of the middle-aged period she was rounding, but as that isn't material to the development of this story, we will give her the benefit of the doubt and merely say that sensibly she dressed in black.

She was Mrs. Wrandall's closest friend and confidante. It was Mrs.

Rowe-Martin who rushed over and gave the smelling salts to Mrs.

Wrandall when that excellent lady collapsed on hearing that her son Challis was going to marry the daughter of old Sebastian Gooch. It was she who acted as spokeswoman for the distressed mother and told the world--that is to say, THEIR world--that Sara was a scheming, designing creature, whose sole aim in life was to get into the smart set by the easiest way. It was she who comforted Mrs. Wrandall, after the lamentable deed was done, by proclaiming from the house-tops that old man Gooch's daughter should never enter society if she could prevent it, and went so far as to invite Challis to all of her affairs without asking his wife to accompany him, quite as if she didn't know that he had a wife. (In speaking of her to Challis, she invariably alluded to Sara as Miss Gooch, for something over a year after the wedding--and might have gone on for ever had not Mrs. Wrandall, senior, upset everything by giving a reception in honour of her daughter-in-law: a bolt from a clear sky, you may be sure, that left Mrs. Rowe-Martin stunned and bleeding on the battlefield of a mistaken cause.) She never quite got over that bit of treachery on the part of her very best friend, although she made the best of it by slyly confiding to other stupefied persons that Challis's father had taken the bit in his mouth,--G.o.d knows why!--and that Mrs. Wrandall thought best to humour him for the time being, at least. And it was she who came to Mrs. Wrandall in her greatest trial and performed the gentlest deeds that one woman can do for another when all the world has gone black and hateful to her. When you put her to the real test, a woman will always rise above herself, no matter how lofty she may have considered herself beforehand.

They were drinking tea, with the lemon left out.

"My dear," said Mrs. Rowe-Martin, "I quite agree with you. Leslie should be thinking of it."

"It means so much to me, Harriet, his getting the right sort of girl.

I feel confident that he is interested--very deeply interested in Miss Castleton."

"I am so glad you like her."

"She is a dear."

"My sister has met her in London, and at one or two of the country places. I was inquiring only yesterday. When I mentioned that she is related to Lord Murgatroyd, Frances remembered her quite well.

She sees a lot of them, you know, during the season," explained Mrs. Rowe-Martin affably.

Mrs. Wrandall concealed her curiosity. In the most casual way she remarked:

"I must ask Miss Castleton if she remembers Mrs. Roodleigh."

"Oh, I fancy she won't recall her," her friend made haste to say.

"Young girls are not likely to remember elderly persons whom they meet--Oh, you might say in pa.s.sing, for that's what it really is, you know."

"Still, if Frances knows the Murgatroyds so intimately it isn't likely--"

"Did I say she knew them intimately?" protested the other, somewhat plaintively. "How like me! So stupid! As a matter of fact, my dear, I don't believe Frances knows them at all--except as one knows people in a general sort of way. Drawing-rooms, you know, and all that sort of thing. Of course, every one knows Lord and Lady Murgatroyd.

Just as they might know the Duke of--well any one of the great dukes, for that matter."

"Or King George," added Mrs. Wrandall softly, without a perceptible trace of spite.

"She has met them, of course," said Mrs. Rowe-Martin defensively.

Somehow, a defence was called for; she couldn't sit there and say nothing.