dependent.  She thanked her cousin occasionally for the kindnesses of which his head gardener and his game-keeper knew much more than he did; and when he said impatiently—­“Please never thank for that sort of thing!” she dropped the subject as lightly as she had raised it.  Secretly she felt that such things, and much more, were her due.  She had not got from life all she should have got; and it was only natural that people should make it up to her a little.

For Cynthia, though she had wished to marry, was unmarried, and a secret and melancholy conviction now sometimes possessed her that she would remain Cynthia Welwyn to the end.  She knew very well that in the opinion of her friends she had fallen between two stools.  Her neighbour, Sir Richard Watson, had proposed to her twice,—­on the last occasion some two years before the war.  She had not been able to make up her mind to accept him, because on the whole she was more in love with her cousin, Philip Buntingford, and still hoped that his old friendship for her might turn to something deeper.  But the war had intervened, and during its four years she and Buntingford had very much lost sight of each other.  She had taken her full share in the county war work; while he was absorbed body and soul by the Admiralty.

And now that they were meeting again as of old, she was very conscious, in some undefined way, that she had lost ground with him.  Uneasily she felt that her talk sometimes bored him; yet she could not help talking.  In the pre-war days, when they met in a drawing-room full of people, he had generally ended his evening beside her.  Now his manner, for all its courtesy, seemed to tell her that those times were done; that she was four years older; that she had lost the first brilliance of her looks; and that he himself had grown out of her ken.  Helena’s young unfriendly eyes had read her rightly.  She did wish fervently to recapture Philip Buntingford; and saw no means of doing so.  Meanwhile Sir Richard, now demobilized, had come back from the war bringing great glory with him, as one of the business men whom the Army had roped in to help in its vast labour and transport organization behind the lines.  He too had reappeared at Beechmark Cottage.  But he too was four years older—­and dreadfully preoccupied, it seemed to her, with a thousand interests which had mattered nothing to him in the old easy days.

Yet Cynthia Welwyn was still an extremely attractive and desirable woman, and was quite aware of it, as was her elder sister, Lady Georgina, who spent her silent life in alternately admiring and despising the younger.  Lady Georgina was short, thin, and nearly white-haired.  She had a deep voice, which she used with a harsh abruptness, startling to the newcomer.  But she used it very little.  Cynthia’s friends, were used to see her sitting absolutely silent behind the tea-urn at breakfast or tea, filling the cups while Cynthia handed them and Cynthia talked;