EUSTACE DAMIER bent his long, melancholy profile over the photograph-album. It was an old-fashioned album; its faded morocco cover, its gilt clasp loosened with age, went with the quiet old-fashioned little room, that had no intentions, made no efforts, and yet was full of meaning, with the charm of an epoch near enough to be easily understood, yet with a grace and a pathos in its modern antiquity deeper than that possessed by a more romantic remoteness. It was the sort of little drawing-room where one’s mother might have accepted one’s father: one could not quite see one’s present in it, but one saw a near and a dear past. The gray wall-paper with its flecked gold flower, the curved lines of the sedately ornamental chairs and sofas, the crisp yet faded chintzes, the wedded vases on the marble mantelpiece, the books, well worn, on stands, the group of family silhouettes on the wall, the cheerful floral carpet—all made a picture curiously unlike the early nineties, and fully characteristic of the sixties. There were many flowers about the room, arranged with a cheerful regularity; the very roses looked old-fashioned in their closely grouped bunches; and in a corner stood a tall ÉtagÈre bearing potted plants in rows that narrowed to an apex. Between curtains, carefully drawn, of white lace and green rep, one saw a strip of garden brilliantly illuminated with sunlight.

It was in just such a room and in such surroundings that Damier had imagined seeing again his old friend, and his mother’s friend, Mrs. Mostyn. He always associated her with a sprightly conservatism. With a genial, yet detached, appreciation of modern taste, she would be placidly faithful to the taste of her girlhood. The house, he remembered, had been her mother’s, and its contents had probably remained as they were when her mother’s death put her in possession of it. He remembered Mrs. Mostyn’s caps, her cameos, her rings, her bracelet with the plaited hair in it, her jests, too, and her gaieties—all with a perfume of potpourri, with a niceness and exactitude of simile that had not attempted to keep pace with the complexities, the allusiveness and elusiveness, of modern humor.

Mrs. Mostyn had lived for many years in this small country house; she had entered it as a childless widow after a life of some color and movement, her husband having been a promising diplomat, whose death in early middle age had cut short a career that had not yet found an opportunity of rising from promise to any large achievement. After his death Mrs. Mostyn devoted herself to books, to her garden, her poor people, and her friends. Her house was not adapted to a large hospitality, but one of these friends was usually with her. Damier, however, was only paying a call. He had never visited Mrs. Mostyn; she had visited his mother in London, and since his mother had died he had been little in England. Now he was staying with the Halbournes, eight miles away.

The atmosphere of the room, as he waited, the stillness of the warm, fragrant garden outside, combined to make a half-tender, half-melancholy mood, in which an impression, quickly felt, is long remembered. Such an impression awaited him in the old photograph-album. It had been natural to see there his mother’s gentle, thoughtful face—first of a round-cheeked girl, looking like a Thackeray heroine, and, later, the face he knew so well, fatigued, sad, yet smiling under gray hair; natural to see his father, with dreaming eyes and the fine head of the thinker; to see aunts and uncles, his dead sister, and himself: but it was with the half-painful, half-joyous shock of something wholly unfamiliar, wholly arresting, strongly significant, that he came upon the photograph of an unknown lady. It was a faded carte-de-visite, and the small lettering on the cardboard edge spoke of Paris and of some bygone photographer. The lady was portrayed in a conventional pose and without modern accessories, leaning one arm in its sleeve of flowing silk on the back of a high chair, a hand hanging, half hidden, against the folds of her silken skirt. She was dressed after the fashion of the late sixties, in that of the Second Empire; yet, though her dress spoke of France, as the photograph had done, and spoke charmingly, her face was not that of a French-woman. One’s first impression—not too superficial, either—was of a finished little mondaine; but finished, poised, serene as she was, she could not be more than twenty—indeed, as Damier reflected, youth at that time was not a lengthy epoch, as in ours. She was slender, the leaning bust and arm rounded, the hand long. Her face was heart-shaped; the dark hair, parted over the forehead and drawn up fully from the brows, emphasized the width across the eyes, the narrowness of the face below; the lips were firm and delicate. Of her eyes one saw chiefly the gaze and the darkness under a sweep of straight eyebrow. And Damier had passed at once through these surface impressions to an essential one: her head was the most enchanting he had ever seen, and her eyes, as they looked at him, had a message for him. Man of the modern world as he was, he stood looking back at this dim, enchanting face; stood trying to interpret its message over the chasm made by more than two decades; stood wondering what she meant to him. He was wrapped in this sensation—of a spell woven about him, of an outstretching from the past, of something mysterious and urgent—when Mrs. Mostyn came in.