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190 “In her room,” admitted Mary unwillingly.

“Making herself bewitching! What did I tell you?” cried Anne.

Mrs. Garden floated into the dining-room in a perfectly irresistible gown, which none of her daughters had seen before. It was all foaming pinks and white, with irruptive lace and bows of three shades of pink nestling in it, and it had an absurd cap to enhance it, that looked, on Mrs. Garden’s soft light hair, as if she had brushed against the dawn and a bit of a pink and white cloud had clung to her head.

“Does look as if Anne were right! If she isn’t, it’s rather mean to make it harder for him,” Jane whispered to Mary, while Lord Wilfrid was helping Mrs. Garden to her chair with a look that proved the wonderful morning costume not lost upon him. He, too, was wonderfully transformed by shaving and the loss of the disguising beard.

Mrs. Garden was sweetly gracious, a charming hostess. She smiled upon Lord Wilfrid and asked about acquaintances they shared in London, how his mother, Lady Kelmscourt’s eyes were; she hoped they were better. Whether his sister, the Honourable Clara, had long felt ill effects from that ugly fall from her horse? And