PART I

A REVERSION TO TYPE

I

If the interior of Squires was revealing, it was quite unconsciously so. Lady Aviolet, one felt sure, was serenely unaware of the need of self-expression that in 1905 was called “modern,” and had she been aware of it, the necessity would not have translated itself through the medium of artistic surroundings.

The original Squires had been burnt to the ground during the Chartist riots, rebuilt, and added to until the square grey mass of flint showed odd, irregular excrescences on every side.

Lower than the house, and surrounded by red brick walls that were older, lay the square stable-yard, surmounted by a clock tower. There had always been hunters in the Aviolet stables, and hounds had been domiciled there two generations earlier.

The gardens lay behind the house. In the front were smooth slopes of grass, a croquet lawn, trim gravelled paths and groups of ornamental shrubs. A square, open space of gravel beneath twin flights of stone steps topped by an openwork stone balustrade wound away between the ornamental shrubs, and eventually became the avenue that ran down the mile length of the park.

The high road lay outside the park gates, white with thick, chalky dust. Wayfarers could see the chimneys through the screening mass of elms, beech trees, and occasional yews.

The windows were better guarded, and could neither be overlooked, nor overlook.

Dr. Lucian, waiting in the hall, did not look out of the windows, but gazed round him, the familiar interior taking a new value as he gave it an attention that he had not given it for years.

The furniture was of heavy Spanish mahogany, the large armchairs upholstered in a blue-grey tapestry that was repeated in the long curtains dividing the hall from the approach to the smoking-room, library, and gun-room. The high, narrow black oak mantelshelf bore five admirable specimens of famille verte.

On the panelled walls hung portraits, all of them rather bad, of Aviolets, in heavy gilt frames. A large writing-table gleamed with silver and dark-green leather with gilt lettering on it, and a smaller table held newspapers and periodicals in orderly array. China stood in glass-fronted cabinets against the walls, and pot plants were grouped on either side of the oak staircase. There were no books, except the four that were all bound alike in loose green leather covers: “Postal Guide,” “Whittaker’s Almanac,” “Bradshaw,” and “A.B.C.,” standing together in a little green stand.

Besides the tapestry curtains, a further door opened out of the hall and Lucian amused himself by conjecturing what lay behind it. He knew that it was Lady Aviolet’s morning-room, but he had never been inside it.

He guessed at pink chintz, rather shabby now, and a writing-table fitted with innumerable pigeon-holes, laden with papers, leaflets, silver photograph frames, and little scarlet woolly garments stabbed together by wooden knitting-needles. A feeble water-colour painting of two young boys probably hung above the table—Ford and Jim Aviolet.

He felt sure that a great many smaller water-colours covered the walls, and that a draped easel set across a corner supported a representation of some such picture as Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World” or Watts’ “Love and Death.” There would be three or four little tables crowded with silver, and silver-gilt trifles, photographs of relatives, and a number of silver vases filled with flowers. A looking-glass would hang over the fireplace, and on the marble mantelshelf would be an ornamental clock, out of order, and a number of other photographs in silver or mosaic-work frames. A revolving bookcase might possibly stand in the middle of the room, containing books on gardening, one or two volumes of Kipling, a work of Whyte Melville’s, and some standard poetry.

No animal, he thought, would be allowed inside the morning-room, although Lady Aviolet was fond of Pug, and he lay in the hall now, panting and snorting. No one was fond of the black Persian cat, except Ford, to whom she belonged, but the black Persian cat, with scrupulous fairness, was also allowed to lie in the hall, like Pug.

Lady Aviolet, when she hurried in at last, even said, “Well, Puss,” as she went past, but she said it without conviction.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Dr. Lucian. I wanted to find some old illustrated papers to amuse my little grandson ... you know what children are like, in bed. You’ve not seen little Cecil yet?”

“No.”

“Not a bit like poor Jim.”

She sighed—a tribute which the doctor supposed to be extorted by convention, since no one aware of the peculiarities that had characterized the mauvais sujet of the Aviolet family could reasonably wish to see his memory perpetuated in his boy. Perhaps, however, the Aviolets did not wish little Cecil to resemble his mother, either. Dr. Lucian had not seen Mrs. Jim Aviolet, but he knew that Jim’s marriage abroad had been looked upon at the time as the crowning folly of a career that had been thickly peppered with follies throughout. Nor had Jim’s death redeemed Jim’s life, although it had the effect—to the doctor’s mind wholly desirable—of causing Sir Thomas Aviolet to offer a home to his daughter-in-law and only grandchild.

They had arrived from Ceylon a month earlier, and, so far as Dr. Lucian was aware, he was the first person in the neighbourhood whose curiosity was to be gratified by an introduction.

He followed Lady Aviolet’s squat, heavy-footed figure up the stairs and along passages so thickly carpeted that their footfalls were inaudible.

Passing through a green baize-covered door, they passed into a chillier region of stairs covered with oil-cloth and pitch-pine cupboards redolent of polish. A pink-sprigged paper covered the walls instead of oak panelling.

“You’ve not seen the nurseries for many years; I think not since Ford and Jim were up here?”

“Not since they both had measles. Jim was only ten years old.”

The doctor remembered that earlier occasion, and his own preference for the scapegrace Jim who had flatly refused to take his medicine while his elder brother Ford, far less ill, had lain with exemplary patience working out chess-problems in bed, and obediently swallowing nauseous draughts.

Lady Aviolet knocked at the door of the room that had been the night nursery, and went in.

“Here is Dr. Lucian, Rose—my daughter-in-law.”

Mrs. Aviolet did not look more than four or five and twenty, built on a large scale, and with something of the slouching awkwardness of an overgrown schoolgirl. Her hair, which was untidy, was a very light brown in front and yellow where it was turned up at the back, and her eyes, big and brown, had beautifully upturned black lashes. Deep dimples showed at the corners of her pretty mouth, and her teeth were white and even. Her worst point might have been her skin, but it was glaringly evident, even to the doctor’s masculine perceptions, that she made lavish and unskilful use of cosmetics.

They looked, at Squires, as much out of place as did her clothes—frilled where Lady Aviolet’s were plain, papery, in spite of their blackness, where the other’s were heavy and substantial.

She gave Dr. Lucian a large and very capable-looking white hand, heavily laden with rings.

“How d’you do? This is my little boy—he’s got a chill.”

The little boy sitting up in bed was very like her, with the same brown eyes, fair hair, and deep dimples, but with a look of fragility. There was nothing in his appearance to recall any of the Aviolets. He was not shy, but eager to talk and to answer questions.

“We hope to get some colour into his face presently,” Lady Aviolet observed. “You know what these Eastern children are.”

She looked at the little boy with dissatisfaction.

“He’s quite healthy,” said Mrs. Aviolet shortly.

She began to give an account of his health, speaking rather defiantly.

“Yes. Yes. I’ll just take his temperature. Put this under your tongue and don’t talk until I take it away again.”

Little Cecil opened his mouth and received the thermometer and then began to laugh, looking round him with big, mischievous eyes.

The doctor held up a warning finger.

“Be quiet, Cecil,” said his grandmother sharply. “Didn’t you hear what Dr. Lucian said?”

“Just you be quiet, Ces,” coaxed his mother. She looked down at him, stroking his forehead.

Lady Aviolet moved to the window. “He’s spoilt,” she said to the doctor, in what she evidently supposed to be an inaudible aside. “We’re looking for a good nursery governess. Just think—seven years old and can’t read yet!”

“When does your son get back?”

“He is back, I am glad to say. It’s difficult to know what to do——” she broke off. “I’d like you to examine Cecil, and see if you think he’s really delicate. I believe they were in some healthy part, up in the hills, but of course it isn’t the same thing as being properly brought up in England.”

The doctor went back to the bedside, made friends with the little boy, and accomplished a very fairly general examination.

“We shall have you up and about again in a couple of days. How do you like England?”

“Very much indeed, thank you. I like the garden, only I’m not allowed to pick the flowers, and there are no monkeys.”

“I’ve got a monkey. Would you like to come and see it?”

“Yes, please.”

The little boy looked delighted.

“A dear little fellow,” said the doctor, as Lady Aviolet took him downstairs again. “I don’t think there’s any need to be uneasy about him at all.”

He repeated the assurance to Cecil’s mother, who had followed them out of the room.

“I knew he was all right. There’s never been anything wrong with him; and this is simply a passing chill—and no wonder, after the heat in the Red Sea.”

“No wonder at all,” the doctor agreed. “He’ll be all right in a day or two.”

Rose Aviolet thanked him, but it struck him that her mother-in-law was still dissatisfied. When they were once more in the hall, and Rose had returned to the nursery, she spoke.

“What do you think of the general health of the child?”

“Excellent, I should think. Heart, lungs, all the rest of it, in very sound order I should say.” He felt faintly surprised at her anxiety. In all the years that he had known her, Lady Aviolet had never struck him as the sort of woman to indulge in foolish, maternal terrors.

“Of course, a tropical child’s first visit to England is always liable to cause a few alarms,” he said tentatively.

“Oh, I’m not nervous. His mother has some idea of his not being fit for school, but as Sir Thomas says, that’s all nonsense. Anyway there’s more than a year before we need think about that.”

“He seems intelligent, but I suppose he’s not had the usual chances of education, if he’s always been in the East.”

“He can’t read or write, but perhaps one couldn’t expect it. But he never seems to have played any games, poor little chap, which is a much more serious disadvantage. As Sir Thomas says, boys can never begin games too young.”

The doctor was not sufficiently in sympathy with Sir Thomas’s dictum to make any reply.

“I am afraid,” said Lady Aviolet in a hesitating way, rather as though the words were forced from her under the compulsion of some unusually strong feeling. “I am afraid that the little boy is going to be a disappointment to Sir Thomas. He is so utterly unlike the Aviolets.”

Dr. Lucian wondered whether she did not rather mean he was so exactly like his mother. The few moments that he had spent in the night nursery had served strongly to confirm the popular verdict that the Aviolets were not pleased with their newly seen daughter-in-law.

“You remember poor Jim, of course. Cecil isn’t in the least like him.”

The doctor inwardly congratulated Cecil on so desirable an escape.

“You were so very kind at the time of all our trouble with poor Jim that I really do want your opinion about the boy. Of course, one hopes that Ford may marry, but meanwhile, this little boy is the only Aviolet of the younger generation, and it does seem so very unfortunate that he should have had the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad.”

The doctor knew that Lady Aviolet would never say what she really meant, which was “the dreadful disadvantage of being brought up abroad by a mother who cannot possibly be described as a lady”; but her grey, prominent eyes, that rather resembled those of a sheep, begged him to take into consideration the whole of the facts that perturbed her, without requiring what she would have regarded as the impropriety of describing them.

“If he may be allowed to come and see us, my sister will be delighted, and it will give me an opportunity of seeing rather more of him and judging as to his fitness for school.”

“Oh, there’s no question about that,” said Lady Aviolet rather quickly. “I’m sure Rose will quite see reason about that, and of course Cecil must go to school. The fact is, there’s a tendency that makes me anxious—it’s so dreadfully un-English. The poor little fellow doesn’t always speak the truth.”

Lucian looked at Lady Aviolet, gravely considering her troubled, stupid, high-bred face. He could gauge accurately the weight that she attached to the accusation by the mere fact that she had brought herself to put it into words.

“Whatever poor Jim’s faults, he was truthful. And you can imagine what it means to Sir Thomas—the soul of truth and honour—to find that this unfortunate little Cecil doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.”

“Has he been frightened—punished too severely, or anything like that?”

“No, it’s not that sort of thing. Sad though that might be, one could understand it. No, the fact is that he—romances. I don’t know what else to call it. And he doesn’t seem to know when he’s doing it—that’s the dreadful part of it.”

“He is highly imaginative, I suppose?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lady Aviolet in a resentful voice. “I was an imaginative child myself. My next sister and I were always playing with dolls, and making them go through imaginary adventures—shipwrecks and fires, and all sorts of things—but I never remember being unable to distinguish between reality and pretence. If either of us had told a story, we should have been whipped, but I never remember such a thing happening.”

“I am not sure that whipping is the best method of treating a child that doesn’t speak the truth. It may only frighten——”

“I know those are the modern ideas,” said Lady Aviolet, seeming rather piteously eager to demonstrate her readiness to accept views that were new to her, and which the doctor knew that she therefore distrusted instinctively.

“It was Ford’s idea that we might consult you about it. It’s not the way we were brought up, if you’ll forgive me saying so—a naughty child was a naughty child, and a sick one was a sick one—but Ford says that everyone now has this idea that the mind and the body are very closely concerned, and react on one another. I daresay there may be something in it.”

“Everything, I should say.”

“And Rose—my daughter-in-law—speaks of this trouble as a kink. She says it’s always been there—that little Cecil’s word has never been reliable. I don’t really know whether she quite realizes what a sad and shocking thing it is. Of course, her own upbringing—— However, that’s neither here nor there. Of course, she spoils him dreadfully.”

“A risk that all only children must run,” the doctor reminded her.

“I don’t know. Ford was an only child for nearly five years, and he wasn’t spoilt.”

There was a sort of obtuse naïveté about Lady Aviolet’s habit of referring any question to her own individual experience that somehow detracted from the glaring certainty that her experience was of a singularly limited kind.

“It was my maid who first spoke to me about Cecil—poor Dawson. You know how devoted she is to us all, and always has been, and I always thought that Jim, if anything, was her favourite of the two boys. So you can imagine that she wouldn’t be very likely to look for faults in Jim’s boy. But she’s been looking after him till we’ve found a governess, and almost from the very first evening he started telling her the most wonderful stories. About things he’d done—or rather hadn’t done—in Ceylon. He told her he always rode on an elephant, and had little native children to pick up his toys, and I don’t know what else—all pure invention, of course.”

“That might have been in the spirit of boasting!”

“But how dreadful! Why should he boast?”

Dr. Lucian shrugged his shoulders.

“Besides, he stuck to it afterwards. Nothing would make him own that it wasn’t true. Dawson tried to make him say he’d just been inventing, and I asked him about it myself. But he kept on saying: ‘It is true, it is true.’ It really seemed as though the child had made himself believe in his own invention.”

“Very imaginative children may sometimes be really incapable of distinguishing fancy from fact.”

“Then all I can say is, they’re not normal,” said Lady Aviolet with decision.

She looked very unhappy, and it was evident that by “normal” she really meant sane.

“Is there anything else—besides the boasting, I mean?”

“Anything else? I don’t know what more you want,” said poor Lady Aviolet, with a certain tartness in her manner. “He is always telling us about things that never happened, and it’s perfectly impossible to depend on his account of anything. And if there’s one thing Sir Thomas finds it hard to forgive, it’s any least little want of openness. He is dreadfully disturbed about it.”

“And your son?”

“Ford hasn’t seen as much of him as we have, besides he’s been away on business since they came. But of course Ford will take him in hand. It’s my one hope. But mercifully, poor Jim left the guardianship of his boy to Ford—jointly with Rose, of course.”

“She is very young?”

“Only twenty-five. She wasn’t nineteen when this child was born. It was the most foolish marriage poor Jim could have made, but one knows what these sea-voyages are. She was going out to the East, and they were engaged before they reached Colombo. Naturally, we were told nothing about it until it was all over. Poor Jim!”

Dr. Lucian felt quite as much inclined to say, “Poor Rose!” Jim Aviolet had been drinking hard long before he was sent out to a tea-plantation in Ceylon, and the doctor saw no reason to suppose that the East had improved him.

“Of course,” said Lady Aviolet, “Jim had his failings. You, of all people, know what we went through with him. But he was never, never anything but straight—I—I can’t imagine any Aviolet being anything else.”

The range of Lady Aviolet’s powers of imagination had never seemed to the doctor to be anything but restricted in the extreme, but his own would not have included anything so unthinkable as the coupling of any Aviolet with an absence of blatant, matter-of-fact, unsparing and uninspired truthfulness of the most literal description. Nevertheless, he made an exception mentally of Ford, whom he had always judged to be capable of un-Aviolet-like subtleties. The thought made him say again:

“Is your son at home now?”

“Yes, I’m glad to say he is. Of course, being little Cecil’s guardian, he has every right to make the child’s upbringing his own affair, and we quite count on him for advising Rose, who is naturally inexperienced. She is by way of being rather clever, don’t you know, and of course Ford has always been clever, so I quite hope she’ll listen to him.”

She spoke rather as though that which she termed cleverness were some peculiarity which set its victims in a class apart from the rest of mankind.

“In what sort of way is Mrs. Aviolet clever?” the doctor asked, mechanically adopting Lady Aviolet’s vocabulary.

“I don’t quite know, but she tells me that she plays the piano, and she seems fond of reading. I often see her with a book, quite early in the day—a thing which was unheard of a few years ago, except in the case of a regular blue-stocking, as we used to call them. If my dear mother had seen any one of her ten children reading a book before six o’clock at the very earliest, she would have asked if we couldn’t find anything to do. But none of us would have thought of doing such a thing. No Amberly has ever been clever, that I know of. In fact, Sir Thomas and I have often wondered how Ford turned out clever, because the Aviolets have none of them ever been in the least odd, either.”

The doctor had so often wondered exactly the same thing, that he could not resist pursuing the subject.

“I am very much interested in problems of heredity,” he admitted, quite aware that Lady Aviolet would see no eccentricity in such preoccupation on the part of a member of the professional classes. “Didn’t an Aviolet marry a Spaniard a good many generations ago?”

“Yes, indeed, not so very long after the Armada. Sir Basil Aviolet. I believe he was in Cornwall, seeing some property the family had there in those days, near Launceston, and he found this girl on the coast somewhere, and fell in love with her. Of course, she must have been English on her mother’s side, and her father a Spanish sailor. I forget her name, but we have a painting of her.”

She indicated the portrait amongst those hanging against the wall.

“It’s difficult to see what the attraction was, but it must have been very strong, or he could never have been so foolish as to marry her,” said Lady Aviolet simply.

The Spanish ancestress had not been beautiful. If the presentation was a faithful one, her long, narrow, wedge-like face had been of a uniformly brown complexion, her dark eyes set too close together, and her upper lip of an inordinate length.

“Some of her descendants would seem to have taken after her,” said Dr. Lucian.

“Yes. Ford is very like this picture. But her own two sons were regular Aviolets, as it happened. Their portraits are in the dining-room. But I suppose foreigners are always rather apt to be clever, so perhaps Ford is a throwback, in that sort of way.”

Widely apart though their respective standpoints for viewing this phenomenon might be, the doctor had long ago reached the same conclusion as had Lady Aviolet.

“A Latin mentality allied to a Saxon physique is a combination which presents some rather interesting contradictions.”

She looked at him quite blankly, and then said with a certain dignity: “I thoroughly believe in heredity myself. Look at the Amberly nose.”

The doctor did not take the injunction literally. He knew the long, straight feature, slightly flattened, with small, insensitive nostrils. He had seen it on Lady Aviolet’s own face, on those of both her sons, and on the faces of almost all the Grierson-Amberlys living on the other side of the county.

“Poor little Cecil isn’t in the least like the Aviolets; though,” she added, with an obvious desire to be just, “he is a good-looking child, I must say.”

“Very,” said the doctor emphatically.

He had taken a curious fancy to the intelligent, mischievous-looking little boy, and he was already keenly interested in the perverseness of imagination that so greatly distressed Cecil’s grandmother. Abnormalities in psychology were, to the doctor’s way of thinking, better worth studying than the majority of the books regarded with so unsympathetic an eye by Lady Aviolet.

Sir Thomas passed through the hall, a tall, broadly-built, elderly man, with a heavy jowl and expressionless eyes.

“Good-morning, doctor. East wind again to-day.”

“Good-morning. Yes, spring’s late in coming this year. Well, I must be off.”

The doctor made his farewells, aware that the presence of her husband would put an immediate end to the inarticulate confidences of Lady Aviolet.

Driving down the avenue, however, he was overtaken by a slim, tweed-clad figure advancing through the beech-glades.

“Hullo, Lucian! Which way are you going?”

“Whitebourne.”

“The very thing, if you’ll give me a lift.”

The doctor watched Ford Aviolet spring with great activity on to the seat of the high dog-cart and adjust himself and his pince-nez with a series of unconscious, accustomed little gestures.

Ford Aviolet had for the past four or five years expressed at intervals a fear that his views were daringly democratic, and the doctor, during a corresponding period, had strongly suspected that he himself was in use as a practical demonstration of Mr. Aviolet’s socialistic tendencies.

The idea had never served to add any charm to their intercourse.

“I suppose you’ve been to see the hope of the house?” Ford’s tone was pensively ironical, as who should hint at inverted commas for the descriptive phrase of which he had made use.

“Your brother’s little boy? Yes. There’s nothing much wrong there—he’ll be running about again in a couple of days.”

“You saw his mother?”

“I did.”

“The likeness between them is rather remarkable. The boy hasn’t anything about him that recalls poor Jim, has he?”

“No, there’s no likeness.”

“Of course, one would have liked the boy to look like an Aviolet, at least. It’s a disappointment to my father, especially as Cecil will no doubt inherit Squires one of these days. At least, so poor Jim appears to have thought.”

There was gentle scorn in Ford Aviolet’s low voice and rather distinct enunciation.

“If he thought such a thing I wonder he didn’t send his wife and boy home long ago,” said Dr. Lucian curtly.

“My dear Lucian, you have been in the family councils ever since you saved Jim’s face over that horrible business of the blacksmith’s girl. You can hardly suppose that Jim imagined my dear father and mother, to say nothing of my humble self, would welcome a bouncing young woman who was barely eighteen on her wedding day, rejoicing in the good old English name of Smith. My charming sister-in-law has already informed us with great candour that she has never set foot in a country house before. The fact, I may add, was almost glaringly obvious.”

The doctor glanced sharply round at Ford. He knew of old that peculiar lucidity of utterance which he had long ago qualified as a curious and elaborate emanation of bitterness. It was as uncharacteristic of the Aviolets as Ford himself was uncharacteristic of his caste.

Physically, he resembled his mother, but his eyes, neither grey nor obtuse, were long and narrow, very dark-brown, and set close together under superciliously curved eyebrows. He was clean-shaven, which added to the youthful appearance of his slight person, standing nearly six foot high, but narrow-shouldered, and with unusually small and delicate hands and feet.

“I gather that Rose’s avocations in Ceylon were dancing, making her own clothes and the child’s, and trying to wheedle money out of Jim for their preposterous bills whenever he was sufficiently drunk to listen to her.”

The doctor, as sincerely disgusted by these confidences as any one of Ford’s own family might have been, continued to maintain silence.

“A man of your profession, Lucian, should be less squeamish at the sight of other people’s dirty linen,” said Ford mockingly. Then his tone changed.

“Of course, it’s in abominable taste to discuss my sister-in-law at all—you’re perfectly right. You must forgive me. The fact is, the whole business has got on my nerves, and you know the utter impossibility of discussing any unpleasant situation with my beloved parents. That generation has such a miraculous capacity for evading the unpleasant. As a matter of fact, I’m really in hopes of your giving me some advice about the boy.”

“Your mother told me. Well, get them to allow Cecil to come and have tea with my sister, and play with the live stock, and see the monkey, and that’ll give me a chance of having him under observation for a bit. It’s probably a case of a lively imagination and the company of native servants.”

“No doubt,” agreed Ford politely; “but it’s an unpleasant peculiarity, and one would like to eradicate it before the wretched child goes to school, if only for his own sake. Could you drop me here, Lucian? I want to speak to the farrier fellow.”

The doctor drove off alone with a distinct sensation of relief.

He had known Ford and Jim Aviolet since their babyhood. His relations with both had been more than merely professional, for he had covered the graceless Jim’s tracks on more than one occasion, and Ford, of later years, had taken pains to demonstrate that he was willing to accept Dr. Lucian as intellectual affinity rather than as family physician.

Nevertheless, the doctor, although he had not liked Jim, liked Ford even less.

II

Rose Aviolet came down to breakfast late, and entered the dining-room awkwardly. Even at her utmost self-confidence she did not possess the art of coming into a room, and at Squires she was not self-confident at all.

The dining-room was large and high, with heavy furniture of Spanish mahogany, crimson curtains across the embrasures of the bow-windows and wide, crimson-cushioned sills, and a crimson flock paper against which hung enormous oil-portraits in gilt frames. On the sideboard stood massive silver dishes, engraved with the Aviolet crest, each dish with a little blue flame burning beneath it, and on other, lesser sideboards were respectively placed the apparatus of tea and coffee, and a selection of fruit arranged on a dessert service of intrinsically hideous Crown Derby. A log fire burnt on the open hearth.

Lady Aviolet, squat, grey-haired, dressed in a silk shirt with a high-boned collar, and a black tweed skirt that showed clumping boots below it, was opening a pile of letters with deliberation.

She had her back to the windows, and faced Sir Thomas at the other end of the square table.

“Good-morning, Rose. How is Cecil?”

“He’s much better, thank you. He can get up to-day.”

Rose moved uneasily between her own place at the table and the sideboard. The procedure at breakfast always embarrassed her.

Was it bad manners to help oneself? They all did so, but then, they were at home, and Rose, most emphatically, was not. It seemed quite wrong to let an old gentleman like Sir Thomas get up and wait upon one....

She placed herself awkwardly in his way, apologised nervously and with unnecessary laughter, and finally stumbled into her chair, full of inchoate resentment and confusion.

Sir Thomas said to his wife, as Rose had heard him say every morning since her own arrival:

“What are the plans for to-day, my dear?”

Lady Aviolet immediately took up a little note-book with silver corners and a silver pencil attached, and began to flutter the leaves.

“The Marchmonts are coming to tea. Very pleasant neighbours of ours, Rose; you will like to meet them. General Marchmont, he is, and there are two unmarried daughters. Poor Mrs. Marchmont is dead, I’m sorry to say. She was a Mallinson.”

Lady Aviolet paused, as though expecting Rose to say something, but Rose had nothing to say. Neither the word “Marchmont” nor the word “Mallinson” conveyed anything to her beyond the mere sound of the syllables, and she hardly even realised that they could be expected to convey anything more.

“The Marchmonts will be interested in the new bulbs,” said Lady Aviolet.

“Anything for the station?” Sir Thomas inquired. “The carriage must meet the two-thirty. Ford is expecting the person from London who wants to see the house.”

“What person? I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

“Some man who is publishing a book, I believe. He wrote a very civil letter, and asked if he might see the place and take some photographs and Ford sees no objection. Surely he asked you about it?”

“I’d forgotten.”

“So long as he looks after the fellow himself, I don’t mind. And he’ll have to show us what he writes. You can’t trust these liter’y fellows a yard, I’m told.”

“Why, what could he do?” Rose inquired.

“Oh, you never know. Might put in all sorts of impertinent details about the family, if he wasn’t watched. But I daresay he’s all right. Ford’ll look after him.”

“Well, then, the carriage to meet the two-thirty,” said Lady Aviolet. “There’s a box from the Stores, too, to be fetched. And the Mudie box. What about sending in the luggage-cart?”

“Yes. That will be all right.”

“Luggage-cart to go this morning, then.” Lady Aviolet wrote again.

“Rose, have you any plans?”

Rose shook her head.

“Thomas, you’re not doing anything?”

“Why, yes, my dear. The bench is sitting to-day. I must go into Cheriton this morning.”

“Oh, dear!”

Lady Aviolet looked quite confounded.

“That means that Tucker won’t have time to get the carriage cleaned before this afternoon. He won’t like that.”

“No, no, that would never do.”

“I might drive you in the pony-cart, Thomas.”

“You’d have to wait and I can’t tell how long I might be kept. No, the lad must drive over, and he can put up the pony at the ‘Angel’ until I’m ready.”

“Will Tucker be able to spare the boy?”

“He must,” said Sir Thomas firmly.

“Then the pony-cart, and the boy, to be round at ten-thirty sharp.”

“Quarter to eleven is quite time enough.”

“Quarter to eleven, then.”

Lady Aviolet read out from the little book:

“The pony-cart to take you to Cheriton at 10.45, with the boy—and lunch had better be half an hour later, in case you can get back for it—the luggage-cart to fetch the Mudie box and the box from the Stores this morning, and the carriage to meet the 2.30 this afternoon. And I suppose this person will take the seven o’clock train back to town. I must find out from Ford. Oh, and the Marchmonts to tea. That’s all, I think.”

No one contributed any further item to the day’s programme.

Ford made an unobtrusive appearance and uttered his casual morning greetings with a detached coolness to which Rose, sharply observant, felt that she herself could never attain.

She could not remember feeling utterly at a loss ever before, except perhaps on her first day at school, when she was nine years old. But then she had never before found herself in any atmosphere in the least like that of Squires. The conversation at meals—there was no conversation at any other time—was unlike any that she had heard before.

In Ceylon, Jim had grumbled about the native labour on the plantation, had told stories circulated on the previous night at the Club, and had listened readily enough to any items of gossip, generally scandalous, that his wife might have assimilated from her neighbours.

At Squires, Rose had heard the plans of the coming day discussed, with minor variations, exactly as they had been discussed that morning, every day since her arrival.

At lunch, Sir Thomas sometimes reported indignantly that the keeper had again complained of poachers, and sometimes, also indignantly, that his agent had suggested that more money should be spent on repairs to farms or cottages on the estate.

To these observations Lady Aviolet might return a trite ejaculation, to which no one made any rejoinder.

At tea, the talk was generally of the garden, of gardens belonging to other people, and of Pug’s taste in cakes and saucers full of milk.

Sometimes people called, but even then the subjects of conversation did not vary. If Sir Thomas had read the Times before dinner, as sometimes happened, he would then speak disparagingly of the Government, although in general terms rather than from the standpoint of any specific grievance. Ford sometimes made a reply, but more often he raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

All the evening Lady Aviolet knitted, glancing from time to time at the clock, and at half-past ten she always said to Rose:

“Well, I daresay you’re ready for bed, my dear. I’m sure I am.”

Then they took silver candlesticks and went upstairs, Rose climbing the additional flight that led to the night nursery in order that she might look at the sleeping Cecil before she went to her own large bedroom on the first floor.

She felt as though she had been for months at Squires, and her heart sank with a feeling of dismay that was almost physical, as she thought of remaining here for years.

As usual, she drifted into the hall after breakfast, knowing that she was not expected to return to the night nursery until the second housemaid had completed her duties there.

She stood beside one of the smaller inlaid tables, disconsolately turning over papers and periodicals.

“There is a new number of the Graphic, I believe,” said Ford’s voice behind her.

“Oh, thanks.”

On a sudden impulse she looked up at him, intensifying the liquid appeal of her big brown eyes almost unconsciously because he was a man, and young.

“I wish I had more to do, here.”

“Do you? I’m sure my mother would be glad of your help in many ways.”

“She just wouldn’t, then. How could I help her? I don’t know anything about her sort of things. I can’t even knit.”

“My dear mother’s interests are not solely confined to her worsted work, I believe,” Ford answered blandly. “She is, for instance, a very keen gardener.”

“As I happen to have lived in North London till I was seventeen, and after that in Ceylon, with a couple of trips to Australia, I’m not awfully likely to be of use in an English garden,” said Rose with angry sarcasm.

“Perhaps not. May I ask in what direction your tastes happen to lie?”

“I haven’t had much chance of finding out, have I? You can guess what life was like with poor old Jim. Every time he got on the drink, Ces and I went in fear of our lives, and——”

“Please!” Ford held up one hand.

She stared at him, abashed and yet still angry.

“I won’t say it, if you don’t want me to. I had to put up with it, though. Look here, I want to talk to you about what we’re going to do.”

“Certainly.”

He pushed forward one of the armchairs, but she remained on her feet. Although Ford Aviolet was tall, their eyes met on a level, and Rose’s square shoulders were broader than his sloping ones.

“It was very kind to pay our passage home, and all that, and of course it was more than time Ces came to England. Jim was always talking about sending him, only we hadn’t the money—but what happens next?”

“We hope you will pay us a long visit,” said Ford in accents that were singularly lacking in spontaneity.

“Thanks,” she said ungraciously. “But you know I’ve got Ceylon friends we could go and stay with—awfully nice people; they live at Bexhill, retired. And I’ve an uncle in London, too.”

Ford visibly repressed a shudder.

“He’s got a big business there—pawnbroking—and his name is Smith,” said Rose very loudly.

Ford’s voice immediately dropped even below its usual subdued pitch.

“Please let us discuss it quietly, if you have no objection. Won’t you sit down?”

With a flouncing movement, she flung herself into the armchair.

“Let us understand one another, Rose. You and I are joint guardians of Jim’s son. As things stand at present, he will in all probability, one of these days, be the owner of this place.”

“I never thought of such a thing! I don’t believe it! Why, surely you’re going to get married and have kids yourself, one of these days?”

“Oh, please, please!”

Ford’s hand went up again, and this time the expression on his face was that of one excruciated.

“There can be no need to enter into questions of that sort. Cecil is my father’s only grandchild at present, and we should naturally wish him to be brought up according to the family traditions. If you wish to pay some visits—and nothing could be more natural, after your long spell abroad—you may feel perfectly certain that Cecil will be as well looked after here as he could possibly be anywhere.”

Ford was looking at the tips of his fingers as he spoke and missed the lowering gaze, rather like that of an angry animal, which she turned upon him.

“How d’you mean, if I want to pay visits? I’m not going anywhere without Ces. He’s never been away from me for a day since he was born.”

“I am sure you would be the last person to let the boy go on being dependent upon you to such an extent, my dear Rose, when you realize how very much harder it will make the inevitable separation between you when it does come. Cecil will be going to school.”

She opened her mouth as though about to speak, checked herself, and then said slowly:

“He’s only seven years old.”

“Oh, certainly, there’s time before us.” Ford smiled. “It was only a word of warning. Cecil’s education is entirely in your department for the time being. I shall not consider that my responsibility really begins until he is of school age.”

“No,” said Rose slowly.

“You will find my mother a little bit—prejudiced, shall we say?—along certain lines of her own, but otherwise you will have no difficulty in making your own arrangements regarding Cecil. I take it you are in favour of a good nursery governess?”

“Oh, I suppose so. It all sounds rather rot to me, you know,” she said ungraciously. “It seems so silly to pay another woman to take care of him, when his own mother has nothing else on earth to do. I could teach him myself, really.”

“I doubt your finding it satisfactory. Not that I should venture to question your attainments for a moment, but teaching is an art which requires peculiar qualifications, I believe.”

“I don’t know any Latin or Greek, if that’s what you mean, but I went to a decent school in North London up to the time I was sixteen, and some of the things I learnt there have stuck. Besides, Life teaches one.”

Ford smiled again. “How true! ‘Life teaches one.’ It has been said before, I believe, but, of course, it’s none the less true on that account.”

Rose flushed scarlet and looked straight at him. “You can sneer if you want to. I don’t suppose you’ve learnt much from Life yourself. You’ve sat here comfortably and eaten your meals and strolled about round your father’s property, and all the time Jim was sweating on the plantation, and drinking worse every day, and me not knowing which way to turn for money to pay the monthly books.”

Her voice had risen to virago pitch.

“There’s no need to raise your voice,” said Ford. His colour came and went in patches, and his breathing was uneven.

“I might remind you that I went through the South African War, and was severely wounded at Spion Kop. I might also point out to you that a man of my age is likely to have had a number of experiences that would scarcely come within the range of your understanding. But on the other hand, I have no taste for scenes. Indeed, for your own sake, I strongly advise you to bear in mind that at Squires people don’t make scenes. It isn’t done, my dear Rose, it really isn’t done.”

He picked up a newspaper and opened it leisurely.

Rose understood that the conversation was over, and that the onus of a retreat had, skilfully enough, been relegated to her.

She turned her back and went upstairs, conscious that her withdrawal lacked dignity. She hated her brother-in-law with the simple, undisciplined intensity that characterised all her emotions.

Her not very long life had, indeed, run altogether upon emotional lines. Her earliest remembrance was of her widowed mother crying piteously because they were being “sold up,” and she had insisted upon attending the sale, only to break down ignominiously. The six-year-old Rose had roared sympathetically, and Uncle Alfred Smith, very angry, had taken them both away.

They had lived with him in London after that, and Rose’s mother had helped in the business, and Rose had gone to school, enjoying violent and ephemeral friendships with other girls, giggling and idling and whispering just as they did, and working by fits and starts when Uncle Alfred wrote her a severe letter or her mother came to see her. The keenest happiness she knew—and it was so intense as to be almost pain—was connected with those occasional visits, when her mother’s big, blowsy person, always dressed in some vivid colour with a fluttering accompaniment of scarf-ends, veil, ribbons, and feathers, would be inducted into the dingy school-parlour to which Rose would rush—hurling herself rapturously against that substantial form, in a mutually enthusiastic exchange of hugs and kisses.

“Shall I take you out, lovey?”

“Oh, do, Mother.”

They had gone out together, very often hand-in-hand, even after Rose was quite a big girl, and looked into the drapers’ shop windows, for which both had exactly the same passion, and planned all the fine things that they would buy when Rose was grown up and married to a millionaire.

“Only mind, you’ll have to love him, ducky. He must be awfully rich, but you must be awfully in love with him, too, or you won’t get any of the best out of life.”

“All right. I’d like to be in love with him, too.”

The afternoon generally finished with tea in a tea-shop.

“Eat up all the cakes you want, my precious. I expect you get enough bread-and-scrape at that school of yours. Can’t you manage another? That little pink one isn’t very large.”

“Well, I’ll try.”

Parting, at the end of the afternoon, was a choky affair on both sides.

“Not so long now till the holidays, pet. Be a good girl and get a prize, to please Uncle Alfred.”

“I really will try, Mother darling. Is he making much fuss about the school-bills?”

“Not a lot. He wants you to be well educated. See here, Rose, he gave me some money the other day. I can give you this.”

“Oh, Mother! It’s too much.”

“Not a bit of it, lovey. Get some chocs, or something good. By-bye.”

Rose would stand on the doorstep and wave, receiving vigorous waves in return, till her mother, still walking backwards, either collided with a passer-by or disappeared round the corner of the street.

The holidays, when they came, had always been blissful, owing to the companionship of that adored mother. They had both of them enjoyed their cramped quarters in one small bedroom over the shop, both disregarded Uncle Alfred’s severe commands as to the consumption of gas with cheerful impunity, turning up the flame as high as it would go, so that both could judge of the effect upon Rose’s mother’s complexion of the new creams and powders with which she was always trying experiments, sometimes with disastrous results.

“I don’t like that brunette powder, one bit. It makes you look sort of green.”

“It’ll match my hair, then,” had been the substance of Mrs. Smith’s reply to her daughter’s criticism, given with a certain grim humour. “However that girl in the hair-dresser’s could have recommended it the way she did, beats me. To hear her, you’d have thought there wasn’t a thing to touch it in heaven or earth. Not a dye, she said, but just a tonic to brighten the colour and clean the scalp. And look at me!”

The effect achieved by the tonic had indeed been remarkable.

“Don’t you ever have a thing to do with hair-dyes, dearie. You’ve got lovely hair, just exactly the colour mine was before I started monkeying with it.”

But Rose’s mother had shown no objection to her daughter’s semi-surreptitious use of the stick of lip-salve that lay in a drawer of the dressing-chest, amid a tangle of veils, hair-nets, twists of paper containing sweets, biscuit-crumbs, hair-pins, belts, stockings, old envelopes, gloves, powder-boxes, and a dozen other accumulated futilities.

Rose could never remember that her mother had given her more than two pieces of advice, besides that which related to her use of hair-dyes.

“Put on clean under-things when you’re going on a journey. You never know if there mayn’t be an accident, nor who’ll pick you up and save you. You don’t want to be taken unawares, is what I say.”

And the other:

“Know your own mind, Rose, and when you’ve found out what you want, you go for it. There’s nothing like Life, when all’s said and done, and if Life isn’t wanting, then I don’t know what it is. And your Mammy’ll help you to get what you want, if she can do it, my pretty.”

But Rose’s mother had been killed in a street accident, two days before Rose was to leave school for good.

For many years afterwards she had been unable to bear the thought of the months that followed. Her grief had been a kind of frenzy, coming upon her in gusts of overwhelming misery when she could barely force down rising screams for Mother, Mother, Mother, crouched upon the floor, biting at the bed-clothes, with clenched hands and streaming eyes.

For months she had dreaded going to sleep in anticipation of the frightful, sick pang that waking, with its renewal of realization, brought her.

Uncle Alfred had been extraordinarily and unexpectedly kind.

He had given her pocket-money, and occasional presents, and had said nothing about the innumerable novels from the circulating library with which she had sought to drug her misery, although he had long ago denounced all fiction as “trash inspired by the Devil.” (Uncle Alfred had “found religion” some years earlier but had never succeeded in imparting the discovery either to his sister-in-law or to his niece.)

It had been, however, without any such altruistic design at all that Uncle Alfred had accidentally provided Rose with the first real distraction from her sorrow.

He had engaged an assistant.

The youth, who helped in the shop all day and slept under the counter at night, and had meals with them in the living-room, fell in love with Rose.

Immediately, and with no false modesty as to showing it, Rose had fallen in love with Artie Millar in return.

It had been a very young, rapid and essentially physical affair, but it had served, to a certain extent, to reveal to Rose the possibilities in herself. She had been partly frightened, and partly exultant. At school she had acquired a garbled knowledge of sex, supplemented by her mother’s crudely worded reassurance.

“Don’t you worry your pretty head, my poppet. It stands to reason you’ve got a body as well as a heart, doesn’t it? And if you ask me, the one wouldn’t be much fun without the other. You’ll find the whole thing sort of works in together, when you fall in love, and nothing to be ashamed of either. It’s all Nature.”

It had been with this comfortable justification at the back of her mind that Rose had let herself go whole-heartedly to the violent mutual attraction that had overtaken herself and the good-looking assistant—a lad of nineteen, with blue eyes and very white teeth flashing from a singularly brown face. He had been at sea for two years before drifting into the pawnbroker’s shop, and the fact held a fascination for the London-bred Rose.

At first they had given one another long, semi-surreptitious looks, then they had tentatively begun an exchange of jokes and personalities, until the day when Artie had suddenly failed in repartee and, when derided by Rose, had replied, flushing deeply:

“You can say anything you jolly well please to me. I—I like it.”

For days after that she had avoided him, while a new delicious consciousness was awakened between them, enhanced by the necessity of behaving as usual in front of Uncle Alfred.

At last one evening, just as Artie was putting up the shutters for the night, Rose, having watched Uncle Alfred leave the house by the side-door, had slipped into the shop and pretended to be very much surprised at Artie’s presence.

“Hallo! Haven’t you finished yet?”

“Just. I say——”

“Well?”

“I say, are you offended with me about anything?”

“What makes you ask?”

“You’ve seemed different, somehow, lately. More stand-off, like.”

These, and other such time-worn phrases, had passed between them, and in the end Rose had simulated anger, strangely curious all the time to see what Artie, provoked, would do.

What he had done, as both had subconsciously intended from the first, had been to catch hold of her and kiss her roughly and suddenly.

It had been Rose’s first kiss, and had been followed by others, given and exchanged in the semi-obscurity of the shop at closing-time and later on, as they grew bolder, in the public parks to which they had repaired secretly on the rare afternoons when Artie was free.

Perhaps a fortnight had elapsed before the discovery by Uncle Alfred of the idyll so rapidly progressing beneath his roof.

Another crisis of the emotions had followed, for Uncle Alfred had denounced Rose to her face, in his strangely passionless, old-fashioned invective, as a “lewd hussy.” But his wrath had not blinded him to the relative value to himself and his business of an intelligent assistant and an idle niece.

It was Rose for whom he had found a post that would take her away from home, that would, in fact, take her out of England, since she was to look after two children travelling with their parents to Ceylon, remain there for a year, and return to England with them.

“A most wonderful opportunity for any young woman,” Uncle Alfred had pointed out.

It had certainly provided wonderful opportunities for Rose.

In spite of a tearful parting and promise of weekly letters, she had forgotten Artie Millar within twenty-four hours of leaving him. The new excitements had been so many and so varied!

Her employers had been kind to her—Mr. Jones-Pryce had attempted to kiss her, but had left off when she protested—and the children had played on deck and given her no trouble.

Rose, enchanted with her new life, had found aboard ship to afford the most delightful opportunities for flirtation, and several young men, Jim Aviolet amongst them, had been ready to flirt.

The emotional climaxes had then come thick and fast, one upon another. There had been Mrs. Jones-Pryce’s rather tardy awakening to her duties of chaperonage, and her crudely worded rebuke to Rose, the ready tears and loud protests of Rose in return, and Jim Aviolet’s eager and indiscreet consolations.

“Give the old hag notice. You’ll easily find another job of the same kind at Colombo, to get you home again.”

“But I don’t want to go home! Uncle Alfred doesn’t want me—and besides, he’d be so angry.”

“You poor little girl! I say, don’t cry, Rose. I may call you Rose, mayn’t I?”

Oh, yes, he might do anything he liked.

She had not been exactly in love with Jim, but pleased and flattered because he was a “real” gentleman (not like Mr. Jones-Pryce) and full of romantic compassion when he had confided to her that he was the “bad hat” of his family.

“It’s drink, mostly. I suppose you think that awful?”

Rose had not thought it nearly so “awful” as a girl of Jim Aviolet’s own class would have thought it. Drink was a not uncommon misfortune amongst her mother’s friends, and amongst Uncle Alfred’s clientèle. She had been fired with enthusiasm at the idea of reforming him, taking care of him.

“I know I could keep straight with a girl like you, Rose,” had been Jim Aviolet’s declaration.

The end of it had been a precipitated parting at Colombo between Rose and her employers, and her marriage to Jim Aviolet.

It was there that romance had ended, and although the emotional climaxes had still come at intervals, they had almost all been painful ones.

Jim had been violently in love with his young wife for a short while, but from the first week of their marriage they had quarrelled, loudly and angrily. Neither had known the meaning of restraint.

Cecil had been a small bone of contention between them almost from the day of his birth.

If there had been emotion over Jim’s death—and Rose was incapable of viewing any personal equation from any but the emotional standpoint—it had been strangely mixed. There had been grief and shame and anger and remorse, but there had also been untold relief.

III

“I am very glad that Rose should form any friendship,” said Lady Aviolet, in a tone which savoured rather of resentment than of gladness.

The friendship in question had risen, with un-Aviolet-like rapidity, between Rose and the Lucians.

She had taken Cecil to tea there, and had been asked again.

“Please have the carriage at whatever time suits you, my dear,” said Lady Aviolet, who had frequently met the doctor’s sister, but had never called upon her, and would never have contemplated the possibility of doing so.

Rose and Cecil departed joyfully.

“Mummie, when are we going back to Ceylon?”

“I don’t suppose we shall go back at all, darling. I told you we were coming to live in England.”

“But I don’t think I like it much,” said Cecil, opening his brown eyes with a piteous look.

“That fine maid Dawson is kind to you all right, isn’t she?” his mother asked sharply.

The corners of Cecil’s mouth turned down. “She says I tell stories.”

“Well, so you do sometimes, as you very well know. Not that you aren’t going to break yourself of it, because of course you are. Aren’t you, my precious?”

Rose looked at him rather anxiously, and squeezed his little hand tightly in hers.

“Yes, Mummie,” said Cecil confidingly.

He leant against her, playing with her rings. He was an affectionate little boy.

“Here we are. Don’t you want to see the monkey again?”

“Yes. And Miss Lucian,” said Cecil politely.

Miss Lucian had been very kind to him on their first visit, and had thereby won Rose’s confidence as well as Cecil’s.

“He’s been longing to come again,” she cried, as she shook hands with her hostess.

Dr. Lucian’s sister was a small, slight person, not young, but looking so because of the rapidity of her movements and the mobility of her small face.

“Would you like to look at pictures in the drawing-room or go and play in the garden?” she asked Cecil.

“The garden, please.”

“Then we’ll call you when it’s tea-time.”

Rose looked at her gratefully.

“That’s just what he enjoys—being let alone to play out of doors. It’s all new to him, you see.”

“There’s a lovely garden for him at Squires.”

“Oh, yes—and a lady’s maid turned on to trot behind him so as to see that he doesn’t do any damage!” Rose interjected scornfully.

“Why, he seems such a good little boy.”

“So he is.”

“I never heard such nonsense,” exclaimed Miss Lucian, with a warmth equal to Rose’s own.

It needed nothing more to inflame Rose’s ardour, never greatly tempered by discretion.

“The whole thing seems nonsense to me,” she remarked vehemently. “Him being put into a nursery and having his breakfast and supper upstairs and that ridiculous old maid Dawson putting him to bed, and not so much as knowing if his little pyjamas fastened in front or behind—honestly, she didn’t, silly old ass! In Ceylon, I had him with me all the time.”

“And can’t you do that at Squires?”

“Oh, Lord, no. They’re always at me about not spoiling him, and making him manly. It’s quite right, I daresay.”

She threw a sudden odd glance round, as though afraid of being overheard, and then said in a lowered voice:

“I’m going to let them have their own way about all the things that don’t matter much. When it comes to something that does, it’ll be time enough to make a fuss. I think it’s rather good of them, really, to put up with me, considering they think Jim was a fool to marry me, and they don’t like me much, either. But they want Cecil to be brought up just like all the Aviolets.”

“That’s natural.”

“I daresay it is. They seem very stupid people, though,” said Rose reflectively. “I say, will you tell me something?”

“Certainly, if I can.”

“Is living in the country, in England, always like this? I mean, do you always potter about all day without doing anything, and look at the papers while you’re waiting for the next meal, and take the dogs for exercise, and never—never—never talk about anything but the rotten old garden, and whether it rained in the night and if the carriage can go to meet the four-thirty train? Don’t you ever, any of you, do anything?”

“You mustn’t ask me, you know. My brother and I are not like the Aviolets—not like county people. He’s a doctor, and works harder than most people, and I run his house, and we’ve only one servant, so that I’m busy, too.”

“Oh——” said Rose Aviolet.

Relief was detectable in her voice.

“Oh, I didn’t know that. I thought you were just like them,” she said naïvely.

“But don’t you like it at all, being at that big house, and never having to think about expenses or anything of that sort?” asked the doctor’s sister.

“I do like it in a way,” Rose admitted grudgingly. “It feels so safe, after the scrambling way that poor Jim and I lived. I like to see Ces having roast chicken, and rice puddings, and all that good milk to drink—as much as ever he wants it. And, of course, I like the comforts and luxuries for myself. Why, I’d never even seen a room like the room I’ve got there—not even at big hotels. But I think the life’s awful, all the same—and the people.”

“Don’t they ever have any one to stay?”

“Not with me and them being in such deep mourning. I think later on they will—Ford said something about it. A man came the other day to take some photographs of the house for a book he’s writing, and I talked to him, but I could see they didn’t like it. Snobs, I call them.”

Rose’s candour was checked only by the doctor’s entrance into the room with Cecil.

“Can we have some tea, Henrietta?”

They had tea in the dining-room, and afterwards Miss Lucian earned Rose’s warm, effusively expressed gratitude for her kindly display of treasures and curiosities on Cecil’s behalf.

The little boy, intelligent and enthusiastic, was delighted with everything, and especially with a little snuff-box of carved cornelian that played a tiny tinkling tune when the lid was opened.

“That belonged to my great-grandfather, Cecil.”

“I do like it,” said Cecil longingly.

His mother interposed hastily, circumventing his evident intention of suggesting that the ownership of the red cornelian box should be transferred.

“It’s awfully pretty. I’ve never seen one quite like it before. It’s worth ten pounds any day.”

Miss Lucian laughed.

“We should put a much higher value than that upon it, I’m afraid.”

“People always do, but you wouldn’t get more than ten from a dealer,” said Rose simply. “My uncle that I used to live with is Alfred Smith the pawnbroker, so I know. Why, I daresay I could price everything in the room for you.”

Miss Lucian appeared to be more diverted than gratified by her guest’s surprising faculty, but the doctor laughed outright.

“Have you offered to do that at Squires?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “They wouldn’t say thank you. Besides, the stuff there isn’t the sort you ever get hold of. I shouldn’t know about any of it, much, except perhaps the china. The bits on the mantelpiece in the hall are good—famille verte.” Her accent was atrocious.

“Lady Aviolet’s particularly fond of them, I believe.”

“Yes. She dusts them herself, and the servants aren’t supposed to touch them. One day I offered to do them for her, but she wouldn’t let me. I only did it to see what she’d say.”

Rose laughed rather drearily, as though the exercise of experimenting with her mother-in-law’s susceptibilities were lacking in charm.

Indeed, as she was leaving the house she remarked with her almost alarming frankness:

“I must say I loathe going back there. It’s been much more fun here. Thank you so much for having us.”

“Like a nice child remembering her good manners,” said the doctor pityingly, after he had put her into the carriage.

“God help her in-laws, is what I say,” Miss Lucian returned crisply.

“Now why, Henrietta? Don’t you like her?”

“Yes, I do, but they don’t, and never will. However, she’ll certainly marry again and then it’ll be all right.”

The doctor was silenced, somehow not enchanted by the proposed solution for the difficulties of the Aviolet establishment.

“Maurice! Where’s the little musical snuff-box?”

“You must have put it down somewhere.”

They looked at one another doubtfully, and then, with silent thoroughness, searched.

The cornelian snuff-box was gone.

It was the outspoken Miss Lucian who finally voiced the thought that had been in both their minds from the beginning.

“Little Cecil was so much taken with it—you don’t think he could have kept it, do you?”

“Surely not. If he’s got it, poor little chap, it must be by mistake.”

“He’d be welcome to anything else, but not to great-grandpapa’s snuff-box,” said Miss Lucian with decision.

“Certainly not. But he’ll probably be brought in tears to-morrow to apologize for taking it away with him.”

“I ought to have put it away at the time,” said Miss Lucian remorsefully. “It was all my fault.”

“Whatever happens, Henrietta, don’t let him be frightened of us and think we’re going to despise him, even if he took it out of naughtiness pure and simple.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” said his sister indignantly.

The doctor was so far from taking her for anything of the sort, that he was inclined to accept the view which she obviously held, that Cecil had purposely, in a fit of baby covetousness, taken the little cornelian box.

It caused him to make his way to Squires next morning, on the pretext of an ailing servant, in the vague hope of seeing Rose Aviolet and avoiding the problem of direct inquiry such as he feared that his sister meditated.

His first sight of Lady Aviolet put the suspicion in his mind beyond question at once.

“I’m so glad to see you. My naughty little grandson seems to have taken advantage of Miss Lucian’s kindness to him yesterday. He picked up a most charming little box, and I’m sorry to say, brought it home with him. One of the housemaids found it under his little pillow, when she made his bed, and took it to my maid, who of course told me.”

“Children are like magpies—they pick things up and hide them.”

“Of course he knew nothing of its value, but it does seem very odd that a child of that age shouldn’t have been better taught. However, I believe he told the truth when his mother taxed him with it, which I was most thankful for. I’m bound to say that she generally gets the truth out of him eventually, though why he couldn’t have been brought up to speak it in the first place, as a matter of course, I can’t imagine. However, Rose tells me he owned at once that he took the little box, meaning to play with it at home, and then take it back. I’m so sorry, Dr. Lucian.”

The doctor laughed.

“Not at all. It was very natural. If I may take the thing away with me, no one will think any more about it.”

“Oh, but that wouldn’t do at all,” said Lady Aviolet, unsmiling. “I don’t mean to punish him, as he spoke the truth, but he must certainly be made to remember that he has done a very wrong thing. He must give you back the box himself, and say that he is sorry.”

The doctor, profoundly averse as he felt himself to be to the proposed scene of restitution, knew that it would be useless to protest against it.

He waited, unresignedly, while Lady Aviolet rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Aviolet and Master Cecil.

Rose Aviolet came downstairs, leading the little boy by the hand.

“Cecil, come here,” said his grandmother directly.

“Good-morning, Grandmama.”

“Good-morning, my dear. Now listen to me. You know that Dr. Lucian and his sister, who were so kind to you yesterday, have lost something?”

“No,” said Cecil guilelessly.

“Ces!” his mother exclaimed sharply.

He stared up at her with big, innocent brown eyes.

“Rose, I thought you told me——”

“So I did. Ces, you know you were a naughty boy, and took——”

“Leave him to me, if you please, Rose. I should like to get to the bottom of this. If the child confessed his naughtiness to you this morning, there’s no reason he shouldn’t own to it again now, in front of Dr. Lucian. Now, Cecil, did you take away anything that didn’t belong to you, when you went to this gentleman’s house yesterday?”

“No, Grandmama.”

Rose Aviolet shrugged her shoulders and made as though to speak.

“One minute, please, Rose. Grandmama won’t be angry, Cecil, if you speak the truth. You know you’ve already told your mother that you were sorry for doing such a naughty thing.”

“Mayn’t we leave it at that?” said the doctor, low.

“I don’t understand it,” Lady Aviolet said, with obvious truth. “He knows that we know already. It’s only saying what he’s already said once. He did own up to you, didn’t he, Rose?”

“Yes, he did. Come on, darling, tell Dr. Lucian you’re sorry you took what wasn’t yours.”

“And that you will never be so wicked as to steal again,” Lady Aviolet supplemented impressively.

“I didn’t,” said Cecil, looking frightened.

His grandmother looked utterly confounded. “Cecil!”

“Don’t!” cried Rose sharply. “Don’t frighten him!”

The doctor leaned forward and took the little boy’s hand, speaking very gently.

“Never mind, little fellow. You know we all do wrong and foolish things sometimes, and then the only way out is to tell the truth and try and undo the mischief. I think I understand how it happened. You thought it would be nice to have the box to play tunes whenever you wanted to, and so you slipped it out of sight and afterwards you were afraid of being seen putting it back. Wasn’t it something like that?”

Rose’s ardent eyes flashed gratitude at him; but her mother-in-law seemed to be more distressed than ever.

“It’s very kind of you—but please don’t make excuses for him. He ought to be made to understand how naughty he’s been. Cecil, are you, or are you not, sorry for having deliberately acted like a thief?”

“I didn’t, Grandmama.”

“Didn’t what?” Her voice had risen slightly.

“Didn’t take the little music-box.”

The little boy’s face was so innocent, his voice so assured, that Lucian glanced at him sharply. He had been staring straight up at Lady Aviolet with his great brown eyes whilst he spoke, but immediately afterwards he dropped them.

The doctor, trained to observation, sighed involuntarily.

A sound like a gasp echoed him, from Lady Aviolet.

“Now, Ces, what’s the good of saying that,” Rose broke out, “when we know already that you did do it? Why, this morning you told me so yourself.”

“No one is going to punish you, Cecil, if you tell the truth. It’s little boys who tell lies that are punished. You shall have one more chance, the last one. Will you tell Dr. Lucian how sorry you are that you took his musical box?”

He gazed at her dumbly, with suddenly scared eyes.

“You are an obstinate and untruthful little boy, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet in great agitation.

“He’s not,” Rose cried passionately. “For goodness’ sake, Ces, tell the truth. They shan’t do anything to you.”

“I didn’t take it,” said Cecil.

“A flat lie,” said Lady Aviolet, her face grey with consternation.

Rose stamped her foot. Her arm shot out round the child’s shoulders, gripping him tightly to her.

“Rose, don’t attempt to coax and spoil him. He has told two absolutely direct lies at least, and nothing can alter it.”

Little Cecil’s eyes dilated, and his mouth shut.

“I’m dreadfully, dreadfully shocked and sorry, Cecil. This isn’t the first time you’ve said what isn’t true, you know, and now we can none of us ever trust you again.”

Rose Aviolet shot a look of fury at the elder woman.

“Please don’t tell him that. Ces darling, Mummie trusts you. I know you want to tell the truth really, and you can if you only will. Now out with it, and it’ll be all over.”

“How can it be over, when he has lied? There is nothing more terrible than a liar, and Cecil has proved himself one over and over again. If he did tell the truth now, it would only be because he knows he’s been found out.”

At her indictment, Cecil at last burst into tears.

“I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” he sobbed abjectly.

Rose put her hand over his mouth.

“You’ve told him that you’ll never trust him again and that he’s a liar even if he does own up,” she said bitterly. “That’s enough.”

“How can you defend him?”

“I don’t defend him. Of course he took the box.”

“That is not the point. Taking the box was mischievous and ill-bred, even dishonest, if he has been taught the commandments, as I suppose he has,” said Lady Aviolet, rather as though supposing the reverse. “But to own to you that he’d taken it, and then deny it flatly to us, is simply pointless falsehood for the sake of falsehood. I told him no one would be angry if he told the truth.”

“Well, he won’t now,” said Rose Aviolet, and she took the little boy away.

He was still crying, and they could hear him, as Rose pulled him up the stairs, repeating like an automaton: “I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

Lady Aviolet looked terribly distressed, but she turned with a rather pathetic politeness to her visitor. “I’m sorry to have inflicted a nursery court-martial upon you. I never dreamt of this. The boy had confessed to his mother. His lies just now were not only wicked, but utterly pointless. I couldn’t have believed it.”

“The child is vain and sensitive. I can imagine that when he saw what he had done looked upon as a—an act of dishonesty, it may have become extraordinarily difficult to him to own to it in front of other people. His denials struck me as being instinctive, rather than based on any idea of deceiving.”

Lady Aviolet looked utterly at a loss.

“But how terrible, if he is to tell lies by instinct,” she said helplessly. “It seems like some frightful taint. Heaven knows, he never got it from the Aviolets.”

She caught herself up, almost upon the words, with the implication they carried.

“I will fetch your little box, Dr. Lucian.” She went away, leaving the doctor thoughtful and strangely saddened.

“I hope they won’t tell Ford,” was the outcome of his reflections.

His sister said the same thing that evening.

“The fuss must have frightened the poor little thing until he didn’t know what he was saying. I hope they’ll leave it alone now, and not drag the high-and-mighty Mr. Ford into it. If they frighten the child, they’ll never teach him to speak the truth. I should have thought Lady Aviolet would have known that much.”

“I tried to tell her so.”

“What did Rose do?”

In common with everybody else, the doctor’s sister made a liberal use of Christian names in the absence of their owners.

“She seems sensible—though I think she spoils him, in a way. But she’s hopeless with her mother-in-law, and doesn’t seem to know the meaning of tact. I should imagine that they get upon one another’s nerves the whole time. She’s a different creature, at Squires, to what she was down here.”

“Poor thing! I hope she’ll come here again.”

“She’ll come fast enough if she can bring the boy. He’s her one thought in life, I can see that.”

“Of course she can bring him,” Miss Lucian declared vigorously. “What do I care how many fibs he tells, poor little chap!”

The doctor was too well used to his sister’s trenchant methods of expressing herself to protest at such singularly perverted tolerance of spirit.

Rose Aviolet came to see them again, but this time she did not bring Cecil with her. She arrived on foot and with something of the aspect of one who has embarked upon an illicit expedition and is anxious to forestall comment on the proceedings.

“I can’t stay, but I wanted a walk, and so I—I came this way. I wanted to tell you how awfully sorry I was about my little boy having taken your musical box—but indeed he didn’t understand what he was doing.”

“My dear, of course he didn’t. Don’t let’s say any more about it.”

“You are good!” Rose informed her hostess with ardent thankfulness in her voice. “And your brother was awfully kind that morning he came up to Squires, too. I wanted to thank him.”

She turned her liquid brown eyes upon Maurice Lucian.

“You know, he’d have owned up, I think, if it had only been you and me there. He didn’t make any fuss at all about telling me, when they first found out about it.”

“You think he’s afraid of Lady Aviolet, then?”

She hesitated.

“He is, and he isn’t. She doesn’t ever punish him, you know. I shouldn’t let any one but me punish him—but she and that Ford have such a way of making one feel as if they despised one for doing anything wrong.”

Lucian nodded.

“Is little Cecil afraid of being despised?”

“Well, of course he is. Who isn’t, I should like to know?”

The doctor answered her indignant inquiry as though she had meant it literally.

“The very obtuse are not, nor the essentially self-satisfied. Neither, I think, are the absolutely sincere—but then, they are seldom the very young. It is the weak, and the sensitive, and those who are unsure of themselves, who are afraid of the contempt of their mental inferiors. And so they degrade themselves by lying.”

He spoke so simply and earnestly that the protest died away on Rose’s lips.

“Mrs. Aviolet, I’m intensely interested in your boy. May I ask you something?”

She nodded, her eyes full of tears.

“Can you analyse this weakness of his? I mean, what do his untruths spring from?”

“I don’t know.” She looked puzzled. “He invents things that never happened, sometimes—that never could have happened—and then when I try to make him say that it’s all pretending, he won’t. Sometimes I think he doesn’t know whether he’s inventing or speaking the truth.”

The doctor nodded, reflective.

“Is he generally the hero of his own stories?”

“I suppose he is. He tells me about things that he says happened to him, and he really and truly describes it all just as if he’d seen it.”

“I daresay. Has the tendency always been there?”

“Pretty well always. He used to hear Jim boasting very often, and I know I exaggerate myself, when I talk, and always did, though God knows I’m trying all I know to get out of it now. But Jim used to make Ces worse by frightening him. He’d ask him questions, just as if he was laying a trap for him, and then Ces would fib, and his father would whip him. So next time he’d be scared, and not know what he was saying, and contradict himself because he’d see Jim didn’t believe him.”

“Poor little fellow!”

She threw him a very expressive look of gratitude.

“That’s awfully decent of you. Everybody up there is shocked at him, poor little boy. They haven’t the imagination to be sorry for him. I wish I could get him right away with me somewhere.”

“Can’t you?” said Miss Lucian.

“Well, I haven’t got a penny. Jim left nothing but debts, and his father gives me an allowance. I’d rather earn my own living, but of course they wouldn’t hear of that, because of Cecil—besides, I’m sure I don’t know what I could do that would bring in anything worth having. Their plan is to keep us hanging on at Squires till Ces goes to school, and then I suppose they’d let me go off on my own, and bring him there just for the holidays. But that’s exactly where me and them will come to loggerheads, one of these days.”

The doctor looked at her attentively. He was extremely interested in Rose Aviolet.

Underneath the paint and the white powder, he could see that she had flushed deeply.

“About sending my Ces to school. That’s what they want to do, of course. Well, I wouldn’t say a word if he was like other boys, but he isn’t. You’ve seen that for yourself—and besides they talk enough about it, goodness knows. You know what’s wrong with Cecil. Well, I think school will make that worse. He’s not fit for school.”

She spoke with extraordinary vehemence, and both her hearers were silent. Presently Henrietta Lucian said:

“There’s never been an Aviolet yet, I suppose, who hasn’t been a public-school boy?”

“Never, and there’s never been an Aviolet like Ces is, either. But he can be put right, I know he can. Why, I always get the truth out of him in the end. But if he goes to school, and gets told he’s a liar and finds nobody trusts him—why, he’ll lie himself black in the face to try and make himself seem what he isn’t. I’m his mother, and I know. But he isn’t going to school.”

“Isn’t his uncle his guardian?”

“Yes. A bit of poor Jim’s tomfoolery that was, too. Of course I never knew about it. I suppose he thought it’d make them take more interest. But even Ford won’t make me give in about this school business.”

“Are you quite sure it mightn’t be a good thing for your boy?” the doctor asked.

“Quite,” she said fiercely. “I’ve seen what a public-school education made of Jim, and though I don’t say I wouldn’t have let Cecil go if he’d been an ordinary child, I won’t, as things are. A thing may be all right for ninety-nine people and wrong for the hundredth. Ces is the hundredth.”

“You’ve got a fight before you,” Lucian told her plainly.

“I don’t care,” said Rose Aviolet, and laughed defiantly. “I’m rather good at a row.”

The doctor quite believed her. But he did not believe that at Squires there ever would be, any more than there ever had been, a “row.”

IV

Maurice Lucian was entirely right in supposing that there were no such things as “rows” at Squires, but the absence of them was not accepted as a matter of course by Rose Aviolet.

A great deal of her intercourse with her dead mother had consisted in descriptions—perhaps vehement rather than accurate—on Mrs. Smith’s part of “a real old hullabaloo between her and me, and I gave it her straight, I can tell you, with her silly old letter about putting it into the hands of her solicitors if I didn’t pay up then and there,” and on Rose’s part of “Well, Mother, I wasn’t going to stand that from a girl like Esther Moses, needless to say, and I said, Mother, I just said, ‘Yes, you may be very good at arithmetic,’ I said, ‘and good reason why,’ I said, ‘Jewess!’”

Rose and her mother, however indignant, had always rather enjoyed their scenes at the moment of occurrence, and still more in the retrospect.

Scenes with Jim, later on, Rose had enjoyed less, but she had entirely accepted them as part of everyday life, although her pride had not allowed her the satisfaction of retailing them afterwards. At Squires, for the first time in her life, she was in an atmosphere in which scenes could not exist.

To her perceptions, nothing vital could exist at Squires at all, except her own vehement emotions, and these were deprived of the only outlet that she knew—unrestrained speech.

The weeks and even the months slid by in a deadly monotony.

“I’m afraid it’s dull for you, Rose,” said her mother-in-law, after the first anniversary of Rose’s widowhood had passed, and she had discarded as much as she dared of her conventional mourning.

“Well, it is, in a way. Of course there was always a lot going on in Ceylon.”

“I believe these Indian hill-stations are very gay,” Lady Aviolet assented. Nothing had ever succeeded in making her remember that “India” could not cover the whole of the East.

“Ceylon isn’t India,” said Rose bluntly.

She thought Lady Aviolet a fool, and her tone said as much.

“Gaieties are naturally out of the question, but we thought of asking one or two people here for the shooting. I don’t think you’ve met Diana Grierson-Amberly, a young cousin of mine. Her father has a nice old place on the far side of the county. She generally pays us a visit in the autumn.”

Rose, utterly inexperienced in the catch-words used in polite society, could think of no reply, and therefore said blankly: “Oh!”

Lady Aviolet sighed, and went on knitting. Rose’s hands lay idle in her lap. She knew how to make her own underclothes, and how to darn stockings, but considered the practice of either art unfitted to the Squires’ drawing-room. She did not knit, because she did not know what to make, and had often speculated as to the destination of Lady Aviolet’s innumerable woolly garments.

“Diana is wonderfully musical, and plays the violin a great deal.”

“Oh, does she?”

“She was always a great friend of the boys, although she is a good many years younger. She is so good at games.”

“Oh, is she?”

“She has been brought up with her brothers, and has even been allowed to go out with the guns. I believe she is an excellent shot.”

“What does she shoot?” Rose enquired with the first spark of interest that Miss Grierson-Amberly had succeeded in rousing within her.

Lady Aviolet looked rather astonished. “Just what they all do, my dear—rabbits, or partridges, or pheasants, as the case may be. No big-game shooting, or anything like that, of course. She is only about your own age.”

“Oh,” said Rose.

“Is there any one whom you would care to ask here for a day or two’s shooting, perhaps?”

Lady Aviolet’s tone held not the slightest hint that she had debated the propriety of this rather rash invitation for several days before giving it, and had finally done so against the advice of her husband.

Rose was astonished and grateful.

“Thank you very much. It’s very kind of you. But there isn’t anybody. I don’t know anybody, you see. My uncle couldn’t leave his business, and besides, I don’t suppose he can shoot. Besides, him and me had rather a row before I left England, and I haven’t seen him since, although we’ve sort of made it up by letter.”

“Perhaps he will come another time, when the guns are not busy,” said Lady Aviolet impassively.

She was completely unaware that Rose was surprised, and rather disappointed, at not being asked for details of the “row.”

“We are hoping to secure a friend of Ford’s, Lord Charlesbury, and one or two other men. Lord Charlesbury is a widower, poor fellow, and has a boy rather older than Cecil. He lost his wife when the boy was born, and has never married since.”

“Poor little boy, without a mother!” said Rose. “What do they do with him?”

“Oh, of course, he’s at school now, very happy indeed. In fact, Ford thought you and he might talk about a good preparatory school for little Cecil with Lord Charlesbury, who has been into it all so recently.”

“I see,” said Rose.

The question of school had been in abeyance lately.

A nursery governess was installed at Squires, and Rose, to the surprise of her mother-in-law, had submitted to having Cecil less with her, and had refrained from interference on the few occasions when he fell into disgrace, and was punished, very mildly, by little Miss Wade.

“We thought of asking him for the First,” Lady Aviolet said.

“The first what?”

“The First of September, my dear.”

And Rose, no wiser than before, for the fifth time could think of no more brilliant rejoinder than “Oh!”

She was, however, pleased at the thought of a party, and went to London and bought two new dresses and a new hat, wishing regretfully that she dared buy coloured things instead of black ones.

On the last day of August Diana Grierson-Amberly arrived. Rose, at first sight of her, sweepingly decided that she was neither smart nor pretty, and, even more rashly, that in the absence of either of these attributes, she could not be very interesting. She willingly conceded, however, that Diana was “nice” when she heard her speak pleasantly to little Cecil, who was allowed to have tea in the hall with his governess.

The attraction that Miss Grierson-Amberly possessed for a small proportion of her fellow-countrymen, although unappreciated by Rose Aviolet, was very far from being non-existent.

Tall and fair, with a typically English face and figure, she looked exactly what Lady Aviolet had said that she was—very good at games. Her chest was as flat as her back, her feet and hands rather large, her face pleasantly vacant, with a beautiful fresh complexion, blue eyes, and a soft mouth that was always slightly open. Rose envied her the perfect self-possession with which she answered Lady Aviolet’s questions, patting and fondling Pug—but not feeding him from the table, a practice that invariably annoyed Sir Thomas when surreptitiously attempted by Cecil’s governess—and returning Ford’s greeting with pleasant, cousinly calm.

“How d’ye do, Diana.”

“How are you, Ford.”

They shook hands, with a momentary exchange of smiles.

“Are you coming out with us to-morrow?”

“Oh, no. I’m not allowed to go out with a gun, really, except with father and the boys.”

“I hear you do great execution, Diana,” said Sir Thomas. “What do you shoot with?”

“A twenty-bore. I couldn’t carry a twelve-bore all day long, I’m sure.”

She turned good-naturedly to Rose, who was staring at her with enormous brown eyes.

“Do you shoot, Mrs. Aviolet?”

“Gracious, no.”

The expletive, savouring rather of Rose’s early surroundings than of her present ones, fell strangely across the atmosphere of the hall at Squires.

“You didn’t get any big-game shooting in the East, then. That’s what made me ask——” Diana said, as though feeling that an apology was perhaps required for the suggestion that had called forth so energetic a declaimer.

“Oh, Lord, no,” said Rose.

Ford coughed very gently.

“You’ve brought your fiddle, Diana, I hope,” said Lady Aviolet.

“I have. I’m afraid I’m dreadfully out of practice, though. One gets so little time.”

“We must have some music after dinner to-night. I know Rose is fond of music, though we do not often hear her play.” Lady Aviolet glanced amiably at her daughter-in-law.

“I can play to-night, if you like,” said Rose abruptly, impelled by an unrecognized instinct of self-assertion, born of her own consciousness that she was out of place amongst these people.

“I can play her accompaniments.” She nodded at Diana, not knowing whether or not she was expected to use the girl’s Christian name.

“How nice of you,” said Diana lightly. “I’ve heaps of music and we’re sure to find something you know.”

The conversation drifted on easily enough. Cecil and Miss Wade went away into the garden, and Rose looked after them with longing eyes, wishing that she could go and play with the little boy, and yet staunch to her resolution that “they” should have their own way in all the things that didn’t matter.

She thought that politeness required her to remain at the tea-table, leaning back in an uncomfortable upright chair, but it did not occur to her to simulate any interest in a conversation which bored her profoundly, and she was as nearly as possible unconscious that every now and then she stifled a half-checked yawn with the back of her hand.

“I hear you have some new neighbours at Bolestone, Diana.”

“Yes, Cousin Catherine. The Frederick Ollertons—such nice people.”

“Let me see, who was she?”

“Wasn’t she a Trevor?” said Ford.

“No, no. You’re thinking of the Arthur Ollertons, in Surrey. He married a Trevor.”

“Ah, that’s it,” Sir Thomas agreed.

“Then who was Mrs. Fred Ollerton? A Bannister?”

“No, that wasn’t it.” Diana’s open brow was corrugated. “No, not a Bannister, though there’s some connection—I think the present Lord Bannister is her uncle.”

“Then she must have been a Saunderson,” Lady Aviolet decided.

“Yes, she was.” Diana’s face relaxed as she agreed almost with enthusiasm. “She was, Cousin Catherine. How stupid of me to forget! Her sister was with them last Christmas—Miss Saunderson.”

“That must have been Connie Saunderson, then—she’s the only unmarried one. The eldest one married Lord Everleach, Connie is unmarried, and Mrs. Frederick Ollerton must be the youngest of them. So disappointing for the Saundersons that there should have been no son in that family.”

“It all goes to a nephew, I believe,” Sir Thomas said.

“Young Verulam, yes. Have you met him, Diana?” Ford enquired.

“I’ve danced with him. He was at the Hunt Ball this year.” She turned amiably to Rose. “Do you know him?”

Rose, startled from the vacancy of thought into which she had drifted in her complete inattention to a conversation that she considered futile, replied brusquely “No,” and there was a sudden silence.

Then Diana, with the super-evident tact of the kind-hearted, remarked rather lamely, “Oh, of course, you’ve been abroad, haven’t you? I forgot that.”

Ford rose, smiling gently after his wont, his mouth curving slightly, his narrow eyes opaque and sombre.

“I hear the carriage, Mother. I hope that’s Charlesbury.”

Diana said, “Oh, good,” in a placid way and Rose straightened herself in her chair, and from long habit, fluffed up a straight end of hair on her temple between her first and second fingers.

Lord Charlesbury was tall, with a kind, thin, sunburnt face, rather good-looking in spite of approaching baldness, and wearing an eyeglass to which Rose, inwardly, after her usual trenchant fashion, immediately applied the epithet of “la-di-dah.”

He greeted Diana Grierson-Amberly by her Christian name, and appeared to be on intimate terms with his hosts.

“How’s the boy, Laurence?”

“Going strong, thanks. He’s as happy as the day is long at Hurst, and they tell me he’s going to be a cricketer.”