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170 Here Lucia bit her pen for a moment. No, it didn't matter about Mr. and Mrs. Eddis. She would never know if they were friends or enemies. Who cared?

Wednesday and Friday alone remained. She did not want either of her hosts on that night to stay at Brayton, but she wrote the most charming letter to each, asking them to come down (special) and dine on each other's nights, and hear respectively the string band and the French play. As a postscript, she gave them her opera-box on Monday and Tuesday.

Mr. and Mrs. Eddis! She sighed at her own thoroughness, and opened the note to Maud, though she had already closed it, and added that she would be so delighted if her father and mother would use her box on Wednesday. Then she telephoned to the box-office, to tell them to let it on the three remaining days of the week if they could.

Such were the preparations for the Brayton week. As they proceeded, Lucia saw what she had not fully grasped at first—the magnitude of its significance, if -it succeeded. Nobody had ever done anything like it before, and to plan it and execute it at the last moment had the daring of genius. True, if it failed, she would have not only to begin again at the beginning, which was as far as Edgar's purblind vision had taken him, but to begin at a disadvantage, at a minus quantity. On the other hand, if it succeeded, she would leap at one bound to an astounding preeminence. To empty London for a week in the middle of the season (as the world counts empty) had hitherto been the office of some institution only like Ascot. And as the hours went on, and the telephone rang, or notes were brought her, she saw that she had not been rash, only daring. Everyone was coming; they could settle their differences and inconveniences among themselves; they had thrown each other over right and left in order to come to Brayton. On the minor readjustments which her plan had entailed, she no longer cared to speculate; as far as the Brayton week went, her balloon was above the clouds; it might be raining below; umbrellas and apologies might be running about in all directions, but she had serene weather.

The foundation of the grand success was laid; everybody was coming, right in the middle of the season, at notice so short that it might be called a summons rather than a notice. But Lucia said no Nunc Dimittis yet, nor did she lose her head. Instead, she planned every hour of those days, all seven of them, so that while every one of her guests would feel free to do as the spirit