that neither my hostess nor my host had appeared. A lady rose from a
sofa, however, and inclined her head as I rather surprisedly gazed at
her. "I daresay you don't know me," she said with the modern laugh.
"I'm Mark Ambient's sister." Whereupon I shook hands with her,
saluting her very low. Her laugh was modern--by which I mean that it
consisted of the vocal agitation serving between people who meet in
drawing-rooms as the solvent of social disparities, the medium of
transitions; but her appearance was--what shall I call it?--medieval.
She was pale and angular, her long thin face was inhabited by sad
dark eyes and her black hair intertwined with golden fillets and
curious clasps. She wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when
she moved and was "cut," as to the neck and sleeves, like the
garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic picture,
something akin even to Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an
image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct,
that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I
had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't
incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now
believe that reflexion concerned in her having sunk again to her seat
with her long lean but not ungraceful arms locked together in an
archaic manner on her knees and her mournful eyes addressing me a
message of intentness which foreshadowed what I was subsequently to
suffer. She was a singular fatuous artificial creature, and I was
never more than half to penetrate her motives and mysteries. Of one
thing I'm sure at least: that they were considerably less
insuperable than her appearance announced. Miss Ambient was a
restless romantic disappointed spinster, consumed with the love of
Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I'm now
convinced she hadn't in her nature those depths of unutterable
thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her