hours of ease Lettice was a poet. Looking up from her task with the bread knife, she saw what he was doing, turned a deep pink, and silently but swiftly removed the sheet from the fingers. Denis laughed.

"Haven't you anything to show?"

"No, I haven't," said Lettice, acerb and forbidding.

"'Sheep on a lonely road, Gray in the gray--'" Denis quoted maliciously. The poet covered her ears with her hands.

"Oh, do-o-on't!"

"Well, let me see the rest of it!"

"Well, it isn't finished; it's no good looking at a thing till it's finished, is it?" retorted Lettice in a soft flurry of exasperation. Her poetry was dug out of her own soul, and she suffered the pains of vivisection in hearing it discussed. Denis knew this well, and Lettice knew he knew it. Looking like an affronted kitten, she retired into a silence that the brutal critic might have called sulky, and seemed disposed to stay there. But Denis knew how to make his peace. Just then the kettle boiled over. He was quick to lift it off--and to put it down again in a hurry, shaking his fingers. Before he could find his handkerchief, down swooped Lettice's arm; she seized the handle, bore it away, took her time over filling the teapot, ostentatiously stayed to settle the cozy; then, having displayed beyond possibility of oversight the superior hardness of her palm, she replaced the kettle on the hob, and returned to her toasting fork, exuding vainglory.

This incident settled, they talked of the aeroplane. This was invariably Lettice's first question, and it brought down a shower of information, all water on a duck's back. Considering what excellent brains she had, it was surprising how dense she could be when she chose. When Denis's fluent Irish tongue ran dry, she was ready with her next question.

"And did you have a nice time at Grasmere with dear Harry?"

"No, I didn't," said Denis with unexpected force. "I had a perfectly beastly time!"

"Dear, dear! How was that?"

"Oh, things went wrong," said Denis vaguely. He wanted to tell the whole story--Lettice seemed to purify and sweeten all she took into her knowledge, and this badly needed sweetening. He hated it; he hated his evasions at the inquest, what Gardiner called his adroitness; he hated soiling 

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