It’s full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It’s an awful mess, Feather.”

“I hope it’s a shoe shop and a jeweller’s as well,” she laughed quite gaily. “And a lace-maker’s. I need every one of them.”

“It’s a rag shop,” he said. “It has nothing but chiffons in it.”

“If ever I do think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons,” was her cheerful response.

“That’s an idea,” he answered with a rather louder laugh. “Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes.”

The fancy attracted her.

“If I had one like that”—with a pleased creative air, “it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder—or even my hat—or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin—and with lovely little pink and blue streamers.” With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before.

“You mustn’t make me laugh,” she said holding up her hand. “I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet—and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn’t really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile.”

Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever.

It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather’s special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun’s or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees.

When Coombe’s eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale—almost as if he saw something which frightened him.

“Who is that under the copper beech—being talked to by Harlow?” he inquired.

Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet.

“It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless—‘Feather’ we call her,” he was answered. “Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn’t see it as quickly.”

“One wouldn’t look at it as long,” said Coombe. “One is in danger of staring. And the little hat—or bonnet—which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won’t be staring if I am talking to her. Please.”

The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel’s when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes—almost before the colour had quite returned to his face—the story of her husband’s idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes.