CHAPTER I.
Miss Kimpsey dropped into an arm-chair in Mrs.Leslie Bell's drawing-room and crossed her small dusty feet before her while she waited for Mrs.Leslie Bell.

Sitting there, thinking a little of how tired she was and a great deal of what she had come to say, Miss Kimpsey enjoyed a sense of consideration that came through the ceiling with the muffled sound of rapid footsteps in the chamber above.

Mrs.Bell would be "down in a minute," the maid had said.

Miss Kimpsey was inclined to forgive a greater delay, with this evidence of hasteful preparation going on overhead.

The longer she had to ponder her mission the better, and she sat up nervously straight pondering it, tracing with her parasol a sage-green block in the elderly aestheticated pattern of the carpet.
Miss Kimpsey was thirty-five, with a pale, oblong little face, that looked younger under its softening "bang" of fair curls across the forehead.