“Tosh!” contemptuously remarked her aunt.  “Don’t be so childish—­I mean Sir Walter Hickle, of course!”

Expecting some violent words of protest the elder woman half rose from her chair, but appalled by the deathly silence and the look on the girl’s face, sank back, cowering in her seat, and stared in the direction her niece’s hand was pointing.

“Look, Auntie, look!”

Leonie stood with one hand pointing at the mantelpiece and the other pressed against her throat as she tried to speak coherently.

The pupils of her eyes were pin-points as she gazed at a wooden frame which, adorned with edelweiss and the Lucerne Lion, held the snapshot of a complaisant individual leaning over the harbour wall, attired in a well-fitting but ill-placed yachting suit.

“Old Pickled Walnuts!  You want me to marry him—­when—­when—­oh! when I thought he wanted to marry you!”

She laughed, a laugh which sounded like the jangling of broken glass, and died almost before it was born; and her aunt, terrified at the sound and the expression on the girl’s face, seized the outstretched arm and shook it violently.

“What are you talking about, Leonie!”

Leonie freed her arm with a shudder.

“Please don’t touch me!” Then making a desperate effort she continued quietly, so quietly indeed that Susan Hetth looked anxiously over her shoulder towards the door.

“Don’t you know that’s his nickname?  Oh! of course you do!  You know he made his fortune by pickling walnuts too rotten to sell.  Sir Walter Hickle—­twist the name a bit and it’s all in a nutshell—­a—­a pickled walnut shell”—­the little unnatural laugh broke across the words—­“and you want me to marry him—­Auntie!  Auntie! he’s awful enough, heaven knows, but not bad enough, nobody could be, to have a—­a mad wife foisted on him—­no! never—­I’ll go out and work!”

There was something very decisive in the last words, but Susan Hetth, like most weak people, found her strength suddenly in a mulish obstinacy, which is a quite good equivalent for, and often more efficacious than mere strength of will.

This obstinacy, backed by the knowledge that people were beginning to gossip about the girl’s aloofness and love of solitude; that the cashing of another cheque would see her overdrawn at the bank; and that until the girl was settled and off her hands she would not be able to solve her own matrimonial problem, drove her to a show of mental energy of which she would not have been capable in an everyday argument.

“Work!” she cried, “work!  What can you do? Nothing—­except go out as a companion or nursery governess!—­and who would take you without a reference—­and who would give you one?  Tell me!”

Leonie remained silent—­stunned.

“As I have told you, we simply cannot afford to live even like this!  I’m overdrawn as it is, and——­”