‘Father expects me to do the garden,’ said Pamela, with rather pinched lips.

‘Well, jolly good thing,’ laughed her brother.  ’Do you a lot of good, Pam.  You never get half enough exercise.’

’I wouldn’t mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I liked.’

’Poor old Pam!  It is hard lines.  I heard father tell the Rector he’d spent eighteen hundred at that sale.’

‘And I’m ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,’ said Pamela fiercely.  ‘Why they go on trusting us I don’t know.’

Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow—­a slim figure in his cadet’s uniform.  To judge from a picture on the wall behind his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a year before the birth of the twins—­an event which had cost the mother her life—­Desmond resembled her rather than his father.  In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined—­as indeed also in Pamela—­with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity—­something that seemed to say, ’There is a soul here—­and a brain.’  It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother’s face with a line in a poem of Browning’s, which she had learnt for recitation at school: 

               This grew; I gave commands;
          Then all smiles stopped together.

Had her mother been happy?  That her children could never know.

Desmond’s countenance, however, soon cleared.  It was impossible for him to frown for long on any subject.  He was very sorry for ’old Pam.’  His father’s opinions and behaviour were too queer for words.  He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like Pamela.  But then he wasn’t going to be long at home.  He was going off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him with a restless and impatient delight.  At the same time he was more tolerant of his father than Pamela was, though he could not have told why.

‘Desmond, give me your foot,’ Pamela presently commanded.

The boy bared his foot obediently, and held it out while Pamela tried on a sock she had just finished knitting on a new pattern.

‘I’m not very good at it,’ sighed Pamela.  ’Are you sure you can wear them, Dezzy?’

‘Wear them?  Ripping!’ said the boy, surveying his foot at different angles.  ’But you know, Pam, I can’t take half the things you want me to take.  What on earth did you get me a Gieve waistcoat for?’

‘How do you know you won’t be going to Mesopotamia?’

’Well, I don’t know; but I don’t somehow think it’s very likely.  They get their drafts from Egypt, and there’s lots of artillery there.’

Pamela remembered with annoyance that Miss Bremerton had gently hinted the same thing when the Gieve waistcoat had been unpacked in her presence.  It was true, of course, that she had a brother fighting under General Maude.  That, no doubt, did give her a modest right to speak.