But Lady Blanchemain (magnificent in purple velvet, with diamonds round her throat and in her hair) didn’t seem interested.

“Do you know,” she said, “I made yesterday one of the most ridiculous blunders of my life.  It’s been preying upon my mind ever since.  I generally have pretty trustworthy perceptions, and perhaps this is a symptom of failing powers.  I told myself positively that you were an Eton and Balliol man.  It never occurred to me till I was halfway home that, as a Papist, you’d be nothing of the sort.”

“No,” said John; “I’m afraid I’m Edgbaston and Paris.  The way her hair grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,—­it’s absolutely lyrical.  And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly like silent music.  And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with two red lips for rhymes.  And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a chin.  And then her figure!  And then her lilac frock!  Oh, it’s a thousand, thousand pities that painting should he a forgotten art.”

“What, the same lilac frock?” said Lady Blanchemain, absently.  “Yet you certainly have the Eton voice,” she mused.  “And if I don’t pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it.”

“I must keep a guard upon myself,” said John.  “She’s visiting an Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,—­the pavilion beyond the clock, in fact,—­an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name of Brandi.”

“I’m rather in luck for my dinner to-night,” said Lady Blanchemain.  “I’ve got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth.  She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa.  Of course I’m putting you next to her.  As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she’s an ardent pervert to Romanism,—­well, a word to the wise.”

“Yes, I know her,” said John.  “We don’t get on a bit.  She moves on far too high a plane for a groundling like me.  She’s intellectual and earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick.  She’ll end, as I’ve told her to her face, by writing books,—­serious novels, probably,—­which she’ll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman.”

“Bother,” said Lady Blanchemain.  “You’re perverse.”

“Besides,” said John, “she’s engaged.”

“Engaged—?” faltered Lady Blanchemain.

“Yes—­to an intellectual and earnest man, named Blake—­Bernard Blake—­a grandson of the famous Blake of Cambridge.”

Lady Blanchemain fixed him with darkening eyes.

“Are you sure?” she pleaded.

“I saw it officially stated in the Morning Post,” was John’s relentless answer.

“What a nuisance,” said Lady Blanchemain, fanning.  Her fan was of amber tortoise-shell, with white ostrich feathers, and the end sticks bore her cypher and coronet in gold.