"What has he done?" she asked.

"We saw that the house on the hill had been let when we passed this morning--"

"It's the most amazing thing that I should have hit upon it," Sir George said.

"You have taken it!" she exclaimed, and clasped her hands with delight. It would be like a little bit of London going to Chidhurst, she thought, and her mother would like him, she was sure of it, this friend of her father's, who would have been difficult to describe, for, though he was old--to her young eyes--he was so agreeable. And he would be some one else for her father to talk with; they would discuss all manner of things concerning the world that she was discovering to be a wonderful place, though Chidhurst, with its beauty and its silence, held aloof from it--and she would listen to them; it would be like hearing a fairy story told at intervals. If only her father did not have to go to Australia--that threat was beginning to make itself distinct, though she tried to forget it."It's very good of you to be pleased at the prospect of a grim old bachelor being near you," Sir George said, and looked at her critically. Her beauty had been taking him by surprise. How lucky Vincent was to have her, he thought. He remembered his own empty rooms in Mount Street, their luxury and loneliness, the precision with which everything kept to its place, their silence and dulness. Vincent had made a mull of his life, but he had a home, and a wife who, though no doubt she was homely enough--mended his socks and cooked his dinner herself, perhaps--was probably a handsome woman, since she was the mother of this beautiful creature. In spite of his opinions, and the manner in which he had kicked aside his prospects, Vincent had not done so badly for himself after all.

"Did father tell you that we lived at Woodside Farm?" Margaret asked.

"Of course he did. I wish I had known it the other day. By-the-way, Vincent," he went on to her father, "it was young Carringford who told me of the house. You remember his father? He was President of the Union just before your time. He died about a year ago worth a quarter of a million, and left two children--this boy, who is only two or three and twenty now, and a girl who married Lord Arthur Wanstead. They have a hundred thousand pounds each."

"It sounds as if it could never be counted," Margaret said.

"Only three thousand a year if they have the luck to get three per cent. for it, and income tax off that. Well, Master 

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