back attic. The stairs were dark; Denis, gloomily reflecting on the decadence of the lower classes, fell over a pair of boots and trod in a dust-pan which flew up and hit him. He was not in the best of tempers when he knocked at his cousin's door.

"Come in!" called out an abstracted voice, wearily raised; and he obeyed. There stood Lettice in the middle of the floor, holding out with both arms before her nose a newspaper which enwrapped her, mind and body. Lettice had been known, when she came in from the Museum after her day's work, to read through the whole of a novel, standing under the gas, before she moved to take off her hat. It took some time for Denis's presence to penetrate, and then she lowered her arms slowly and looked round.

"O-oh," she said. "I thought you were the milk. Sit down, sit down."

She folded up her paper and poked it under a book, took away his hat and stick, and fetched the milk from the passage, hurrying slowly, as her custom was. Denis sat down, and discovered that he was very glad to be with her again. A cooling fountain in life's dry, dreary sand, that was what Lettice represented. She was not a beauty; she had none of the attributes of a heroine. Her nose was nondescript, her complexion poor, her mouth large, though there was character in the full under lip; character also, and brains, in the big forehead which she hid beneath her soft brown hair. For the rest, she had drooping shoulders and a long slim neck; she chose and put on her clothes like a Frenchwoman; but her best points were the set and shape of her graceful little head, and the somewhat misleading sweetness of her hazel eyes.

Her room was a long white attic, one end curtained off. There was a window in the gable facing west, and in the window a table overflowing with manuscripts and books; sheets of foolscap covered with her graceful writing, an Old English text, a Latin grammar, a treatise on court hand. She was trying to make up for a haphazard education by teaching herself. As she passed on her way to the cupboard, she drew a sheet of paper out of the muddle and presented it to Denis.

"Now you can just look through that while I'm making the tea, and see if there are any mistakes," she enjoined him in the minute expressive voice which was one of her charms to those who found her charming. Denis found himself faced by a Latin exercise. When he had learned all his cousin could tell him about the wreaths and the roses that adorned the girls and the queens, he turned the page, and came on something more attractive. In her 

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