LITMIR.BIZ

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till she had drifted across her future husband’s path at an hotel in Florence.

      “What attracted me,” Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on the only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche Farrow, “was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity.”

      Blanche had looked at him a little sharply. She had never known Lionel attracted by weakness or simplicity before. All women seemed attracted by him—but he was by no means attracted by all women.

      “Poor Milly didn’t care for Wyndfell Hall,” he had gone on, “for she spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it’s a delightful place, and I hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it is now let. ‘Twon’t be an easy job, for they’re devoted to it.”

      Of course he had got them out very soon, for, as Blanche Farrow now reminded herself, Lionel Varick had an extraordinary power of getting his own way, in little and big things alike.

      It was uncommonly nice of Lionel to have asked her to be informal hostess of his first house party! Unluckily it was an oddly composed party, not so happily chosen as it might have been, and she wondered uneasily whether it would be a success. She had never met three of the people who were coming to-night—a Mr. and Miss Burnaby, an old-fashioned and, she gathered, well-to-do brother and sister, and their niece, Helen Brabazon. Miss Brabazon had been an intimate friend, Miss Farrow understood the only really intimate friend, of Lionel Varick’s late wife. He had spoken of this girl, Helen Brabazon, with great regard and liking—with rather more regard and liking than he generally spoke of any woman.

      “She was most awfully kind to me during that dreadful time at Redsands,” he had said only yesterday. And Blanche had understood the “dreadful time” referred to the last weeks of his wife’s life. “I’ve been to the Burnabys’ house a few times, and I’ve dined there twice—an infamously bad cook, but very good wine—you know the sort of thing?”

      Remembering that remark, Blanche now asked herself why Lionel had included these tiresome, old-fashioned people in his party. Then she told herself that it was doubtless because the niece, who lived with them, couldn’t leave them to a solitary Christmas.

      Another guest who was not likely to add much in the way of entertainment to the party was an enormously rich man called James Tapster. Tapster was a cynical, rather unpleasant person, yet on one occasion he had helped Varick out of a disagreeable scrape.

      If the host had had his way there would also have been in the party a certain Dr. Panton. But at the last moment he had had to “chuck.” There was a hope, however, that he might be able to come after Christmas. Dr. Panton was also associated with the late Mrs. Varick. He had attended her during the last long weeks of her life.

      Blanche Farrow’s face unconsciously brightened as she remembered Sir Lyon Dilsford. He was an intelligent, impecunious, pleasant kind of man, still, like his host, on the sunny side of forty. Sir Lyon was “in the City,” as are now so many men of his class and kind. He took his work seriously, and spent many hours of each day east of Temple Bar. By way of relaxation he helped to run an Oxford College East–End Settlement. “A good chap,”—that was how Blanche summed him up to herself.

      Lionel had asked her if she could think of any young people to ask, and she had suggested, with some hesitation, her own niece, Bubbles Dunster, and Bubbles’ favourite dancing partner, a young man called Bill Donnington. Bubbles had arrived at Wyndfell Hall two days ago. Donnington had not been able to leave London till today.

      Bubbles? Blanche Farrow’s brows knit themselves as she thought of her niece, namesake, and godchild.

      Bubbles was a strange girl, but then so many girls are strange nowadays! Though an only child, and the apple of her widowed father’s eyes, she had deliberately left her home two years ago, and set up for herself in London, nominally to study art. At once she had become a great success—the kind of success that counts nowadays. Bubbles’ photograph was always appearing in the Sketch and in the Daily Mirror. She was constantly roped in to help in any smart charity affair, and she could dance, act, and sell, with the best. She was as popular with women as with men, for there was something disarming, attaching, almost elfish, in Bubbles Dunster’s charm. For one thing, she was so good-natured, so kindly, so always eager to do someone a good turn—and last, not least, she had inherited her aunt’s cleverness about clothes! She dressed in a way which Blanche Farrow thought ridiculously outré and queer, but still, somehow, she always looked well-dressed. And though she had never been taught dressmaking, she could make her own clothes when put to it, and was always willing to help other people with theirs.

      Hugh Dunster, Bubbles’ father, did not often favour his sister-in-law with a letter, but she had had a letter from him three days ago, of which the most important passage ran: “I understand that Bubbles is going to spend Christmas with you. I wish you’d say a word to her about all this spiritualistic rot. She seems to be getting deeper and deeper into it. It’s impairing her looks, making her nervous and almost hysterical—in a word, quite unlike herself. I spoke to her some time ago, and desired her most earnestly to desist from it. But a father has no power nowadays! I have talked the matter over with young Donnington (of whom I sometimes suspect she is fonder than she knows), and he quite agrees with me. After all, she’s a child still, and doesn’t realize what vieux jeu all that sort of thing is. I insisted on reading to her ‘Sludge, the Medium,’ but it made no impression on her! In a sense I’ve only myself to thank, for I used to amuse myself in testing her amazing thought-reading powers when she was a little girl.”

      Bubbles had now been at Wyndfell Hall two whole days, and so far her aunt had said nothing to her. Somehow she felt a certain shyness of approaching the subject. In so far as she had ever thought about it—and she had never really thought about it at all—Miss Farrow regarded all that she knew of spiritualism as a gigantic fraud. It annoyed her fastidiousness to think that her own niece should be in any way associated with that kind of thing. She realized the temptation it must offer to a clever girl who, as her father truly said, had had as a child an uncanny power of thought-reading, and of “willing” people to do what she liked.

      Blanche Farrow smiled and sighed as she stared into the fire. How the world had changed! She could not imagine her own father, though he had been far less conventional than was Hugh Dunster, talking her over with a young man.

      Poor Bill Donnington! Of course he was devoted to Bubbles—her slave, in fact. Blanche had only seen him once; she had thought him sensible, undistinguished, commonplace. She knew that he was the third or fourth son of a worthy North-country parson—in other words, he “hadn’t a bob.” He was, of course, the last man Bubbles would ever think of marrying. Bubbles, like most of her set, was keenly alive to the value of money. Bubbles, as likely as not, would make a set, half in fun, half in earnest, at James Tapster!

      To tell the truth, Miss Farrow had not forgotten Bubbles when she had assented to Lionel Varick’s suggestion that rich, if dull-witted, James Tapster should be included in the party.

      In what was called the moat garden of Wyndfell Hall, twilight was deepening into night. But Lionel Varick, who was now pacing up and down the broad path which followed the course of the moat, could still see, sharply outlined against the pale winter sky, the vision of tranquil beauty and the storehouse of archaeological and antiquarian interest which was now his home.

      By his special orders the windows had been left uncurtained. There were lights in a great number of the rooms—indeed, the lower part of the house was brilliantly illuminated. But as the windows in the beautiful linen-panelled hall were diamond-paned, the brilliance was softened, and there was something deliriously welcoming, almost fairy-like, in the picture the old house presented to its new owner’s eager gaze.

      After a while he stayed his steps near the narrow brick bridge which spanned the moat where a carriage road connected the domain of Wyndfell Hall with the outside world, and, as he stood there in the gathering twilight, he looked a romantic figure. Tall and well-built, he took, perhaps, an almost excessive care over his dress. Yet there was nothing effeminate or foppish about his appearance.

      A follower of that

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