"Thank you, Duchess. I—I am indeed to be congratulated, for she is the most perfect——"

"Tà, tà, tà, I don't mean that at all! I mean I want to congratulate you on what you have been able to do for her in so short a time."

"I? To do for her?" He was honestly puzzled.

"Yes, you. Do you suppose she has always been what she is now? Not a bit of it. The last time I saw Brigit Mead—it was at Ascot—she was a very good-looking, of course—oh, unbelievably beautiful, if you prefer it, but an ill-tempered, black-faced young minx, who should have been put on bread and water for a month to correct her manner."

"Her manners!" shouted Théo, unable to believe his ears.

"No. Her manners were always all right, but her manner was atrocious. And you have made her most delightful, as well as ten times lovelier than I would have thought possible. There, now, you may go to her." And Théo wasted no time.

"Love is a strange thing, isn't it?" went on the old woman to her neighbour, without looking to see who he was, for it is a remark that may safely be addressed to anybody.

"It is a damnable thing," growled the afflicted Carron, for it was he who chanced, for his sins, to have paused just then under the pretence of lighting a cigarette.

"Exactly," assented the Duchess briskly. "It has led you an awful life, Gerald, hasn't it?"

"The absurdity of calling that boy's feelings for Brigit by the same word that must express——"

"Yours for her mother, eh? Go away, you immoral thing!"

CHAPTER TWELVE

There was to be no Bridge that evening, and by unspoken consent everyone sat in the hall. It was a cold night, and the roaring fire was pleasant to hear, and in the expressive slang of the time, "things went."

Everyone was amused; for the time being, the bores had ceased from boring, and the bored were at rest. Brigit, who loved to look into wet and be dry, to look into cold and be warm, sat in the one plain glass window in the place (its coloured predecessor had been broken by a Roundhead cannon-ball and for vainglorious Family Reasons never been replaced), so that she could look alternately into the storm and at the comfortable, cheery scene 

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