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.