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RV 158 "Pauline darling! Dexter! Have you been waiting long? Oh, dear—my hour-glass seems to be quite empty!"

Mrs. Percy Landish was there, slipping toward them with a sort of aerial shuffle, as if she had blown in on a March gust. Her tall swaying figure produced, at a distance, an effect of stateliness which vanished as she approached, as if she had suddenly got out of focus. Her face was like an unfinished sketch, to which the artist had given heaps of fair hair, a lovely nose, expressive eyes and no mouth. She laid down some vague parcels and shook the hour-glass irritably, as if it had been at fault.

"How dear of you!" she said to her visitors. "I don't often get you together in my eyrie."

The expression puzzled Pauline, who knew that in poetry an eyrie was an eagle's nest, and wondered how this term could be applied to a cement bungalow in the East Hundreds But there was no time to pursue such speculations.

Mrs. Landish was looking helplessly about her. "It's cold—you're both freezing, I'm afraid?" Her eyes rested tragically on the empty hearth. "The fact is, I can't have a fire because my andirons are wrong."

"Not high enough? The chimney doesn't draw, you mean?" Pauline in such emergencies was in her element; she would have risen from her deathbed to show a new housemaid how to build a fire. But Mrs. Landish shook her head with the look of