Bubbles was a strange girl, but then so many girls are strange nowadays!  Though an only child, and the apple of her widowed father’s eyes, she had deliberately left her home two years ago, and set up for herself in London, nominally to study art.  At once she had become a great success—­the kind of success that counts nowadays.  Bubbles’ photograph was always appearing in the Sketch and in the Daily Mirror.  She was constantly roped in to help in any smart charity affair, and she could dance, act, and sell, with the best.  She was as popular with women as with men, for there was something disarming, attaching, almost elfish, in Bubbles Dunster’s charm.  For one thing, she was so good-natured, so kindly, so always eager to do someone a good turn—­and last, not least, she had inherited her aunt’s cleverness about clothes!  She dressed in a way which Blanche Farrow thought ridiculously outre and queer, but still, somehow, she always looked well-dressed.  And though she had never been taught dressmaking, she could make her own clothes when put to it, and was always willing to help other people with theirs.

Hugh Dunster, Bubbles’ father, did not often favour his sister-in-law with a letter, but she had had a letter from him three days ago, of which the most important passage ran:  “I understand that Bubbles is going to spend Christmas with you.  I wish you’d say a word to her about all this spiritualistic rot.  She seems to be getting deeper and deeper into it.  It’s impairing her looks, making her nervous and almost hysterical—­in a word, quite unlike herself.  I spoke to her some time ago, and desired her most earnestly to desist from it.  But a father has no power nowadays!  I have talked the matter over with young Donnington (of whom I sometimes suspect she is fonder than she knows), and he quite agrees with me.  After all, she’s a child still, and doesn’t realize what vieux jeu all that sort of thing is.  I insisted on reading to her ‘Sludge, the Medium,’ but it made no impression on her!  In a sense I’ve only myself to thank, for I used to amuse myself in testing her amazing thought-reading powers when she was a little girl.”

Bubbles had now been at Wyndfell Hall two whole days, and so far her aunt had said nothing to her.  Somehow she felt a certain shyness of approaching the subject.  In so far as she had ever thought about it—­and she had never really thought about it at all—­Miss Farrow regarded all that she knew of spiritualism as a gigantic fraud.  It annoyed her fastidiousness to think that her own niece should be in any way associated with that kind of thing.  She realized the temptation it must offer to a clever girl who, as her father truly said, had had as a child an uncanny power of thought-reading, and of “willing” people to do what she liked.

Blanche Farrow smiled and sighed as she stared into the fire.  How the world had changed!  She could not imagine her own father, though he had been far less conventional than was Hugh Dunster, talking her over with a young man.