“Good skin,” remarked Lord Walderhurst, irrelevantly.  “Good hair—­quite a lot.”

“She has some of the nicest blood in England in her veins, and she engaged my last cook for me,” said Mrs. Ralph.

“Hope she was a good cook.”

“Very.  Emily Fox-Seton has a faculty of finding decent people.  I believe it is because she is so decent herself”—­with a little laugh.

“Looks quite decent,” commented Walderhurst.  The knitting was getting on famously.

“It was odd you should see Sir Bruce Norman that day,” Agatha Slade was saying.  “It must have been just before he was called away to India.”

“It was.  He sailed the next day.  I happen to know, because some friends of mine met me only a few yards from your picture and began to talk about him.  I had not known before that he was so rich.  I had not heard about his collieries in Lancashire.  Oh!”—­opening her big eyes in heart-felt yearning,—­“how I wish I owned a colliery!  It must be so nice to be rich!”

“I never was rich,” answered Lady Agatha, with a bitter little sigh.  “I know it is hideous to be poor.”

“I never was rich,” said Emily, “and I never shall be.  You”—­a little shyly—­“are so different.”

Lady Agatha flushed delicately again.

Emily Fox-Seton made a gentle joke.  “You have eyes like blue flowers,” she said.  Lady Agatha lifted the eyes like blue flowers, and they were pathetic.

“Oh!” she gave forth almost impetuously, “sometimes it seems as if it does not matter whether one has eyes or not.”

It was a pleasure to Emily Fox-Seton to realise that after this the beauty seemed to be rather drawn toward her.  Their acquaintance became almost a sort of intimacy over the wool scarf for the deep-sea fisherman, which was taken up and laid down, and even carried out on the lawn and left under the trees for the footmen to restore when they brought in the rugs and cushions.  Lady Maria was amusing herself with the making of knitted scarfs and helmets just now, and bits of white or gray knitting were the fashion at Mallowe.  Once Agatha brought hers to Emily’s room in the afternoon to ask that a dropped stitch might be taken up, and this established a sort of precedent.  Afterward they began to exchange visits.

The strenuousness of things was becoming, in fact, almost too much for Lady Agatha.  Most unpleasant things were happening at home, and occasionally Castle Clare loomed up grayly in the distance like a spectre.  Certain tradespeople who ought, in Lady Claraway’s opinion, to have kept quiet and waited in patience until things became better, were becoming hideously persistent.  In view of the fact that Alix’s next season must be provided for, it was most awkward.  A girl could not be presented and properly launched in the world, in a way which would give her a proper chance, without expenditure.  To the Claraways expenditure meant credit, and there were blots as of tears on the letters in which Lady Claraway reiterated that the tradespeople were behaving horribly.  Sometimes, she said once in desperation, things looked as if they would all be obliged to shut themselves up in Castle Clare to retrench; and then what was to become of Alix and her season?  And there were Millicent and Hilda and Eve.