She held out her hand and welcomed him with a smile.
"This is perfectly charming of you, Mr.Tallente," she said.

"I know how busy you must be in the afternoons, but I am afraid I am old-fashioned enough to like my men friends to sometimes forget even the affairs of the nation.

You know my sister, I think--Lady Alice Mountgarron?
Aunt, may I present Mr.Tallente--the Countess of Somerham.

Mrs.Ward Levitte--Lady English--oh! and Colonel Fosbrook." Tallente made the best of a very disappointing situation.

He exchanged bows with his new acquaintances, declined tea and was at once taken possession of by Lady Somerham, a formidable-looking person in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, with a rasping voice and a judicial air.
"So you are the Mr.Tallente," she began, "who Somerham tells me has achieved the impossible!" "Upon the face of it," Tallente rejoined, with a smile, "your husband is proved guilty of an exaggeration." "Poor Henry!" his wife sighed.