asked Winnie.

"What's it got to do with you where he is?"

Jenny was in a turmoil of nervous indecision, and felt that whatever
else she did, she must be quit of Stacpole Terrace for that day at
least. She debated the notion of going home, of telling her mother
everything; but the imagination of such an exposure of her most intimate
thoughts dried her up. It would be like taking off her clothes in front
of a crowd of people. Then she thought of going home without reference
to the past; but she was prevented by the expectation of her mother's
readiness to believe the worst, and the inevitably stricter supervision
to which her submission would render her liable. In the end, she
compromised with her inclination by deciding to visit Edie and find out
what sort of sturdy rogue her nephew was by now.

Edie lived at Camberwell in a small house covered with Virginia creeper
not yet in leaf, still a brownish red mat which depressed Jenny as she
rattled the flap of the letterbox and called her sister's name through
the aperture. Presently Edie opened the door.

"Why, if it isn't Jenny. Well I never, you are a stranger."

Edie was shorter than Jenny and more round. Yet for all her plumpness
she looked worn, and her slanting eyes, never so bright as Jenny's, were
ringed with purple cavities.

"How are you, Edie, all this long time?"

"Oh, I'm grand; how's yourself?"

"I'm all right."

The two sisters were sitting in the parlor, which smelt unused, although
it was covered with lengths of material and brown-paper patterns. By the
window was a dressmaker's bust, mournfully buxom. Jenny compared it with
the lay figure in the studio and smiled, thinking how funny they would
look together.

"I wish Bert was in," said Edie. "But he's away on business."

Just then a sound of tears was audible, and the mother had to run out of
the room.

"The children gets a nuisance," she said, as she came back comforting
Eunice, a little girl of two.

"Isn't she growing up a little love?" said Jenny. "Oh, I do think she's
pretty. What glorious eyes she's got."

"They're like her father's, people say; but young Norman, he's the
walking life-like of you, Jenny."

"Where is the rogue?" his aunt inquired.

"Where's Norman, Eunice?"

"Out in the garding, digging gwaves," said Eunice in a fat voice.

Jenny had a sudden longing to have a child of her own and live in a
little house quite close to London.

"Why, I don't believe you've ev