the pathos of the thought. She was filled with commiseration for her own hard plight... Father’s letters were bracing. No pity here; only encouragement and exhortation. “Remember, my dear, a sacrifice grudgingly offered is no sacrifice at all. What is worth doing, is worth doing well. I hope to hear that you are not only an agreeable, but also a cheerful and cheering companion to your old aunt!”

Darsie’s shoulders hitched impatiently. “Oh! Oh! Sounds like a copy-book. I could make headlines, too! Easy to talk when you’re not tried. Can’t put an old head on young shoulders. Callous youth, and crabbed age...”

Not that Aunt Maria was really crabbed. Irritable perhaps, peculiar certainly, finicky and old-fashioned to a degree, yet with a certain bedrock kindliness of nature which forbade the use of so hard a term as crabbed. Since the date of the hair episode Darsie’s admiration for Lady Hayes’s dignified self-control had been steadily on the increase. She even admitted to her secret self that in time to come—far, far-off time to come,—she would like to become like Aunt Maria in this respect and cast aside her own impetuous, storm-tossed ways. At seventy one ought to be calm and slow to wrath, but at fifteen! Who could expect a poor little flapper of fifteen to be anything but fire and flame!

Wet days were the great trial—those drizzling, chilly days which have a disagreeable habit of intruding into our English summers. Darsie, shivering in a washing dress, “occupying herself quietly with her needlework” in the big grim morning-room, was in her most prickly and rebellious of moods.

“Hateful to have such weather in summer! My fingers are so cold I can hardly work.”

“It is certainly very chill.”

“Aunt Maria, couldn’t we have a fire? It would be something cheerful to look at!”

“My dear!” Lady Hayes was apparently transfixed with amazement. “A fire! You forget, surely, the month! The month of August. We never begin fires until the first of October.”

“You’d be much more comfortable if you did.”

There being no controverting the truth of this statement, Lady Hayes made no reply. But after the lapse of a few minutes she volunteered a suggestion.

“There is a grey Shetland shawl folded up under the sofa rug. You had better put it over your shoulders, since you feel so cold.”

“I?” Darsie gave an 

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