Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/48

Rh the day before that those lovely simple wood flowers could not be found at florists' shops nor in flower women's baskets.

After all, she said to herself, it did not matter that Mila had come; she was silly and not very proper, and a nuisance altogether; but Mila was responsible for her own sins, and sometimes could be amusing. So the Lady Hilda, in a good-humoured and serene frame of mind, crossed the corridor to the apartments her cousin had taken just opposite to her own.

"He is certainly very striking looking—like a Vandyke picture," she thought to herself irrelevantly, as she tapped at her cousin's door; those cyclamens had pleased her; yet she had let thousands of the loveliest and costliest bouquets wither in her anteroom every year of her life, without deigning to ask or heed who were even the senders of them.

"Come in, if it's you, dear," said Madame Mila, ungrammatically and vaguely, in answer to the tap.

The Countess de Caviare was an English-woman, and a cousin, one of the great West