"Wait till I give her Noo York," returned the American, placidly.

It seemed that Lady Holme's secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned by the vestal virgin.

CHAPTER VII

LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought such things "all damned rot." Few functions connected with the arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America solely in order to witness prize fights.

As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom one or two of his "pals" began to call a "deuced pretty girl" but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.

Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley.

The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.

That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley's attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley's card in his hand.

"What have you got there, Fritz?" she said.

He gave her the card.

"You never told me you'd run up against her," he remarked.

Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.

"Why--do you know Miss Schley?" she asked.

"Not I."

"Well then?"

"Fellows say she's deuced takin'. That's all. And she's got a fetchin'

name--eh? Pimpernel."

He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady Holme was again looking at the card.

"Surely it isn't Wednesday?" she said.

"Yes, it is. What did you think it was?"

"Tuesday--Monday--I don't know."

"Where'd you meet her?"

"Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein's."

"Is she pretty?"

"Yes."

There was no hesitation before the reply.

"What colour?

"Oh!--not Albino."

Lord Holme stared.

"What d'you mean by that, girlie?"

"That Miss Schley is remarkably fair--fairer than I am."

"Is she as pretty as you?

"You can find out for yourself. I'm going to ask her to something--presently."

In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:

"Right you are. Pimpernel--I should like to have a squint at her."

"Very well. You shall."

"Pimpernel," repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was evident.

Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the "something" already mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a "turn" in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter's gowns, and happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.

That consisted in a really admirable hint--it could not be called more--of Lady Holme's characteristic mannerisms.

Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl's days. The wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.

Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of their amusement.

Two people, however, were indignant--Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.

Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure to capture the London public as an actress.

"She's done it as a woman," someone replied to him.

"Not the public, only the smart fools," returned Carey.

"The smart fools have more influence on the public every day."

Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and _ennui_, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford's invitation and resolved to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.

Sir Donald's servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour filled up.

With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.

He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.