would love it. He's full of the old villain. He might help you if you'd let him. He's at the British Museum at this moment, getting deeper and deeper into what he calls the family mire." "I happen to see him coming down the road," observed Miss Julia, dryly. "I must really beg that you will not refer to the subject again, Mr. Gillon." But in her voice and manner there was a hesitating reluctance that emboldened me to use my own judgment about that, especially when Uvo Delavoye (whose mother and sister were keen Brabazonians) himself introduced the topic on joining us, with a gratuitous remark about his "unfilial excavations in Bloomsbury." "I've opened up a new lazar-house this very day," he informed us, with shining eyes, when Miss Julia had shown an interest in spite of herself. "By the way," I cut in, "don't you think it would all make magnificent material for a novel, Uvo?" "If you could find anybody to publish it!" he answered, laughing. "You wouldn't mind if he was put into a book--and the place as well?" "_I_ wouldn't, if nobody else didn't! Why? Who's thinking of doing us the honour?" Dear Miss Julia coughed and laughed with delicious coyness. My liberty had been condoned. "Was it you, Miss Brabazon?" cried Uvo, straightening his face with the nerve that never failed him at a climax. "Well, it was and it wasn't," she replied, exceeding slyly. "I did think I should like to write a little story about Witching Hill House, and put in rather a bad character; at least he would begin by being rather undesirable, perhaps. But I was forgetting that the place had been in your family, Mr. Delavoye. I certainly never knew, until Mr. Gillon told me, that one of the Lords Mulcaster had been--er--perhaps--no better than he ought to have been." "To put it mildly," said Delavoye, with smiling face and shrieking eyes. "You may paint the bad old hat as black as mine, Miss Brabazon, and still turn him out a saint compared with the villain of the case I've been reading up to-day. So you really needn't worry about anybody's susceptibilities. Lay on the local colour inches deep!" "Really, Mr. Delavoye!" cried Miss Julia, jocosely shocked. "You mustn't forget that my story would only appear in our _Parish Magazine_--unless the R.T.S. took it afterwards." "My rude forefather in a Religious Tract!" "Of course I should quite reform him in the end." "You'd have your work cut out, Miss Brabazon." "I ought to begin with _you_, you know!" said Miss Julia, shaking a facetious finger in Uvo's face. "I'm afraid you're rather an irreverent young man, and I don't know what the Vicar would say if he heard us." She threw another deliciously guilty glance towards the house. "But if you really mean what you say, and you're sure Mrs. Delavoye and your sister won't mind either----"
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