With momentary awkwardness he explained that Mrs.Toplady's name had but once casually passed Mrs.
Woolstan's Tips in his hearing, and that till now he had forgotten the circumstance.
"I saw her yesterday," said the lady of the roguish lips.

"She's in trouble about parting with her little boy--just been sent to school." "Ah--yes." "Very sweet face, hasn't she?
Is the child like her?
I never saw him--perhaps you never did, either ?" Mrs.Toplady had a habit, not of looking steadily at an interlocutor, but of casting a succession of quick glances, which seemed to the person thus inspected much more searching than a fixed gaze.

Though vastly relieved by the assurance that Mrs.Woolstan had used discretion concerning him, Dyce could not become at ease under that restless look: he felt himself gauged and registered, though with what result was by no means discernible in Mrs.Toplady's countenance.

Those eyes of hers must have gauged a vast variety of men; her forehead told of experience and meditation thereon.

Of all the women he could remember, she impressed him as the least manageable according to his method.