and for her solitude assuaged by clandestine trysts.  Those trysts lay heavy on Leonora’s mind; although she had discovered them, she had done nothing to prevent them; from day to day she had put off the definite parental act of censure and interdiction.  She was appalled by the serene duplicity of her girls.  Yet what could she say?  Words were so trivial, so conventional.  And though she objected to the match, wishing with ardour that Ethel might marry far more brilliantly, she believed as fully in the honest warm kindliness of Fred Ryley as in that of Ethel.  ‘And what else matters after all?’ she tried to think....  Her reverie shifted to Rose, unfortunate Rose, victim of peculiar ambitions, of a weak digestion, and of a harsh temperament that repelled the sympathy it craved but was too proud to invite.  She felt that she ought to go upstairs and talk to the prostrate Rose in the curt matter-of-fact tone that Rose ostensibly preferred, but she did not wish to talk to Rose.  ‘Ah well!’ she reflected finally with an inward sigh, as though to whisper the last word and free herself of this preoccupation, ‘they will all be as old as me one day.’

‘Mr. Twemlow,’ said the parlourmaid.

Milly deliberately lengthened a high full note and then stopped and turned towards the door.

‘Bravo!’ Arthur Twemlow answered at once the challenge of her whole figure; but he seemed to ignore the fact that he had caused an interruption, and there was something in his voice that piqued the cantatrice, something that sent her back to the days of short frocks.  She glanced nervously aside at Harry, who had struck a few notes and then dropped his hands from the keyboard.  Twemlow’s demeanour towards the blushing Ethel when Leonora brought her forward was much more decorous and simple.  As for Harry, to whom his arrival was a surprise, at first rather annoying, Twemlow treated the young buck as one man of the world should treat another, and Harry’s private verdict upon him was extremely favourable.  Nevertheless Leonora noticed that the three young ones seemed now to shrink into themselves, to become passive instead of active, and by a common instinct to assume the character of mere spectators.

‘May I choose this place?’ said Twemlow, and sat down by Leonora in the other corner of the Chesterfield and looked round.  She could see that he was admiring the spacious room and herself in her beautiful afternoon dress, and the pensive and the sprightly comeliness of her daughters.  His wandering eyes returned to hers, and their appreciation pleased her and increased her charm.

‘I am expecting my husband every minute,’ she said.

‘Papa’s gone out for a walk with Bran,’ Milly added.

‘Oh!  Bran!’ He repeated the word in a voice that humorously appealed for further elucidation, and both Ethel and Harry laughed.

‘The St. Bernard, you know,’ Milly explained, annoyed.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a St. Bernard out there,’ he said pointing to the French window.  ’What a fine fellow!  And what a fine garden!’