The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner's wife, whom she called Annie, and treated still rather as a not very wise and utterly inexperienced young girl.

But she had consented to accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no means the case with all of his wife's influential connections.

Married young and splendidly at some remote epoch of the past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs and even of some great men.

She herself was a great lady.

Old now in the number of her years, she had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind.