Rome than he would have been at the front.

And now, dear friend, to business and pleasure both. We shall be delighted to take your sweet Lily for the winter. You say “round about four pounds a week.” In old days willingly would we have taken her for less than that, but now, alas, everything is very expensive. I suggest, therefore, five pounds a week, hoping that will not seem to you exaggerated. You say she should be much out of doors—that will be easy; we are surrounded by orange trees and olive groves; there is also a garden to which the Count gives much thought and care. We are quiet people and seldom go down into Monte Carlo. We neither of us frequent the Casino. The fact that we are householders in Monaco would make it illegal for us to gamble, even were we drawn to do so, which we are not. But I will see that Lily does not lead too dull and sad a life with her Aunt Cosy and Uncle Angelo.

If the terms, five pounds a week, suit you, may I suggest that you telegraph? Letters take so long coming and going. Perhaps you will add the approximate date of Lily’s welcome arrival.

Receive, dear Thomas, the assurance of my affectionate and grateful memory.

Cosima Polda.

12Lily folded the letter up again. It told a good deal, and yet it seemed to tell her nothing real of the writer. She knew that Uncle Tom had liked the Countess far more than Aunt Emmeline had done. Aunt Emmeline always sniffed when her step-sister was mentioned, and yet the Countess had appeared to be so very fond of her.

12

Turning back the flap of the little case, Lily noticed there was something else there. What a methodical man Uncle Tom was, to be sure! In addition to the Countess’s letter, he had put the telegram which had arrived just as they were starting for the station—the telegram which asked Lily to postpone her arrival for two days. Uncle Tom had wired back that that was impossible, as all arrangements had been made, and he had again given the exact hour of her arrival at Monte Carlo.

Both Lily and Angus Stuart realised that they owed their very comfortable journey from Paris to their kindly, quaint fellow-traveller, Hercules Popeau.

A party of South Americans had made a determined effort to turn Lily out of the first-class carriage where she had settled herself with some difficulty in Paris. It was this at the time unpleasant episode which had made her acquainted with 

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