The atmosphere appeared to him intensely feminine and yet strange.

He realised suddenly that it contained no knick-knacks,--nothing, in short, but books and flowers.
Perhaps his greatest surprise, however, came at the opening of the door.
It seemed at first that he was confronted by a stranger.

The woman who entered in a perfectly white gown of some clinging material, with a single row of pearls around her neck, with ringless fingers and plainly coiled hair, seemed like the ghost of her own girlhood.

It was only when she smiled, a smile which, curiously enough, seemed to bring back something of that aging sadness into her face, that he found himself able to readjust his tangled impressions.

Then he realised that she was no longer a girl, that she was indeed a woman, beautiful, graceful, serious, with all the charm of her greater physical and spiritual maturity.
"Please don't think," she begged, as she sank into the settee by which he was standing, "that I have inveigled you here under false pretences.
Henry took the trouble to ring me up from the City this morning to say that he should be dining at home--such an unusual event that I took it for granted it meant a tete-a-tete .-- I don't quite know why I treat you with such an extraordinary amount of confidence," she went on, "but I feel that I must and it helps me so much.