smell."

Sir Robert sniffed vigorously. "I follow you," he agreed. "Old lavender perfume, ottomans, high-backed chairs, chintzes that look as though they came out of the ark, and a few mouldy daguerreotypes. The whole thing's here, all right."

"Perhaps it's just as well for us that it is," she observed. "I have come to the conclusion that furniture people are the least trustful in the world. I don't think even dad could get a van-load of furniture on credit."

Sir Robert nodded sympathetically. He was a pleasant-looking man, a little under middle age, with bright, alert expression, black hair and moustache, and perhaps a little too perfectly dressed. He just escaped being called dapper. "Chucking a bit more away in the Law Courts, isn't he?"

Letitia indulged in a little grimace. "Not even you could make him see reason about that," she sighed. "He is certain to lose his case, and it must be costing him thousands."

"Dashed annoying thing," Sir Robert remarked meditatively, "to have a cottage within a hundred yards of your hall door which belongs to some one else."

"It is annoying, of course," Letitia assented, "but there is no doubt whatever that Uncle Christopher made it over to the Vonts absolutely, and I don't see how we could possibly upset the deed of gift. I am now," she continued, moving towards a stand of geraniums and beginning to snip off some dead leaves, "about to conclude the picture. You behold the maiden of bygone days who condescended sometimes to make herself useful."

The scissors snipped energetically, and Sir Robert watched his sister-in-law. She was inclined to be tall, remarkably graceful in a fashion of her own, a little pale, with masses of brown hair, and eyes which defied any sort of colour analysis. But what Sir Robert chiefly loved about her were the two little lines of humour at the corners of her firm, womanly mouth.

"Yes, you're in the setting all right, Letty," he declared, "and yet you are rather puzzling. Just now you look as though you only wanted the crinoline and the little curls to be someone's grandmother in her youth. Yet at that picture show the other night you were quite the most modern thing there."

"It's just how I'm feeling," she confided, with a little sigh, standing back and surveying her handiwork. "I have that rare gift, you know, Robert, of governing my personality from inside. When 

 Prev. P 6/218 next