I'm--'

He stopped, for the insisting lady had entered.

It was Camilla.

He jumped up. Never before in his career had he been so astounded,
staggered, charmed, enchanted, dazzled, and completely silenced.

'Miss Payne?' he gasped after a prolonged pause.

Simon Shawn effaced himself.

'Yes, Mr. Hugo.'

'Won't you sit down?'

The singular prevalence of beautiful women in England is only
appreciated properly by Englishmen who have lived abroad, and these
alone know also that in no other country is beauty wasted by women as it
is wasted in England. Camilla was beautiful, and supremely beautiful;
she was tall, well and generously formed, graceful, fair, with fine
eyes and fine dark chestnut hair; her absolutely regular features had
the proud Tennysonian cast. But the coldness of Tennysonian damsels was
not hers. Whether she had Latin blood in her veins, or whether Nature
had peculiarly gifted her out of sheer caprice, she possessed in a high
degree that indescribable demeanour, at once a defiance and a surrender,
a question and an answer, a confession and a denial, which is the
universal weapon of women of Latin race in the battle of the sexes, but
of which Englishwomen seem to be almost deprived. 'I am Eve!' say the