required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and
efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the
charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge
from this morning mist as a dry and metallic old woman.

If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick's hospitality, it
did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her
manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all
her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the
rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She
was lavishly but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her
host's industry, and as the other guests assembled, straying with vague
ejaculations through the labyrinth of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs.
Peyton noted that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.

To his visitors' requests to be shown his plans for the competition,
Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two
fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in
their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and
dazzled the ladies by allusions to fenestration and entasis. The party had
already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced
Darrow's approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in
by mistake, embarrassed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper
confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about
the urn. To the men he threw a gruff nod of fellowship, and Dick having
relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs.
Peyton's welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when
she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss
Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the
office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello's. The girl