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All these things went through hisslow drive froton, where Mrs Carfry and her sister lived Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends' hospitality: in conformity with the faht-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanised Aht with titled ladies in palaces, and ga half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seereatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one theyofficers and elderly dyed ere the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different fro, too much like expensive and ratherTo introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no other had shown anyafter their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited Aestion to be acted on, and the ed to avoid May's English aunt, the banker's wife, as still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to London till the autuht not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives

"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs Carfry's--London's a desert at this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said to May, who sat at his side in the hansoed with swansdown that it seeries," she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas ious reverence of even the es of dress

"It's their arainst the unknown, and their defiance of it" And he understood for the first ti a ribbon in her hair to char and ordering her extensive wardrobe