Mr. Pett’s amiable face writhed into what was intended to be a bitter smile.

“I’m only trailing a quiet place to read in.  I never saw such a place as this house.  It looks big enough outside for a regiment.  Yet, when you’re inside, there’s a poet or something in every room.”

“What about the library?  Isn’t that sacred to you?”

“The boy Ogden’s there.”

“What a shame!”

“Wallowing in my best chair,” said Mr. Pett morosely.  “Smoking cigarettes.”

“Smoking?  I thought he had promised aunt Nesta he wouldn’t smoke.”

“Well, he said he wasn’t, of course, but I know he had been.  I don’t know what to do with that boy.  It’s no good my talking to him.  He—­he patronises me!” concluded Mr. Pett indignantly.  “Sits there on his shoulder blades with his feet on the table and talks to me with his mouth full of candy as if I were his grandson.”

“Little brute.”

Ann was sorry for Mr. Pett.  For many years now, ever since the death of her mother, they had been inseparable.  Her father, who was a traveller, explorer, big-game hunter, and general sojourner in the lonelier and wilder spots of the world and paid only infrequent visits to New York, had left her almost entirely in Mr. Pett’s care, and all her pleasantest memories were associated with him.  Mr. Chester’s was in many ways an admirable character, but not a domestic one; and his relations with his daughter were confined for the most part to letters and presents.  In the past few years she had come almost to regard Mr. Pett in the light of a father.  Hers was a nature swiftly responsive to kindness; and because Mr. Pett besides being kind was also pathetic she pitied as well as loved him.  There was a lingering boyishness in the financier, the boyishness of the boy who muddles along in an unsympathetic world and can never do anything right:  and this quality called aloud to the youth in her.  She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs and succour the oppressed, and wild rebel schemes for the reformation of her small world came readily to her.  From the first she had been a smouldering spectator of the trials of her uncle’s married life, and if Mr. Pett had ever asked her advice and bound himself to act on it he would have solved his domestic troubles in explosive fashion.  For Ann in her moments of maiden meditation had frequently devised schemes to that end which would have made his grey hair stand erect with horror.

“I’ve seen a good many boys,” she said, “but Ogden is in a class by himself.  He ought to be sent to a strict boarding-school, of course.”

“He ought to be sent to Sing-Sing,” amended Mr. Pett.

“Why don’t you send him to school?”

“Your aunt wouldn’t hear of it.  She’s afraid of his being kidnapped.  It happened last time he went to school.  You can’t blame her for wanting to keep her eye on him after that.”

Ann ran her fingers meditatively over the keys.