that ever gave delight to a painter of pretty women. And she was "done" by all the fashionable artists of the day in every imaginable style of dress and posture. She had a very small share of wit, but with women like Connie, a little wit goes a long way. Her lovely head was forever turning to look down dark paths, and no one but her mother ever observed those sidelong glances. When she was twenty-two, she married a perfectly suitable young man, and Madame Claire hoped that the then serious duties of wifehood and motherhood would fill her shallow little head to the exclusion of dark romancing. But they had been married less than a year when Petrovitch with his leonine head and his matchless playing became the rage of London, and Connie, in company with a good many other women of her type, threw her youth and beauty, like a bouquet of flowers, at his feet. He was able to resist much, but the sheer loveliness of Connie made such an onslaught upon his bored indifference—wherein was mingled the most astonishing conceit—that when his contracts in London expired, he returned to Paris with the emotional and hysterical young wife clinging to his arm.
It was just at the outbreak of the Boer War, and Leonard Humphries, her husband, very natu-
