“Do you like it?” she said.

I felt a momentary anxiety as I looked up.  I had made a bad mistake only a little time before, having waxed enthusiastic over what I took to be a new blouse when it was a question of hair-dressing, the blouse having been worn by my wife, so she solemnly averred, “every evening for the last two months.”

But this time no mistake was possible.  You don’t go about the house at eleven o’clock on a cold Spring morning fancifully arrayed in a pale blue hat with white feathery things sticking out all round it, unless there is a particular reason for so doing.

“I think it’s a delightful hat,” I said, “and suits you splendidly.  But I thought you never wore blue?”

“I don’t,” said Nancy; “that’s what makes me rather doubtful.  I didn’t really mean to buy it at all.  I went in to Marguerite’s—­you know, that heavenly shop at the corner of the square”—­I nodded; of course I knew Marguerite’s—­“to ask the price of a jade-green jumper they had in the window—­oh, my dear, a perfect angel of a jumper!—­and they showed me this.  That red-haired assistant almost made me buy it; said she had never seen me in a hat that suited me so well; and really it wasn’t so very dear.  But I was a little doubtful.  However—­”

“She was quite right,” I said very decidedly.  “Did you get the what-you-may-call-it—­the other thing?”

Nancy’s face expressed poignant anguish.

“Twelve guineas,” she said.  “I simply couldn’t run to it.  Of course I was heart-broken.  Still, it wasn’t as if I really needed anything just now.  It would have been ridiculous extravagance.  But it really was an angel.”

She turned to go, stopping a moment on the way out to have another look at herself in the little round mirror over the mantel-piece.

“I’m not quite happy about it,” I heard her murmur as she went out.

The next morning I found a letter waiting for me at the office which brought me news of a totally unexpected windfall of some fifty odd pounds.  It was a sunny morning, too, with a distinct feeling of Spring in the air.

I felt like being extravagant, and my mind flew at once to Nancy and her jade-green—­what was the name of the thing?—­that she had wanted so badly.

I left the office early, and on my way home managed to summon up sufficient courage to carry me through the discreetly curtained doors of Madame Marguerite’s recherche establishment, devoutly hoping that the nervous sinking which I felt about my heart was not reflected in my outer demeanour.

The red-haired girl, in spite of a curiously detached and supercilious air, as who should say, “Take it or leave it; it concerns me not in the least,” which at first rather alarmed me, was really quite kind and helpful.

“Something in jade-green that Moddom admired?  A hat perhaps?”

No, I knew it was not a hat.  I murmured something about twelve guineas.  This seemed to be enlightening.