knitting, droned out voluntaries and national airs on the wheezy old
harmonium, and listened to endless reminiscences of the Henstock family,
and other worthies equally unknown.

In the afternoons Norah roamed the different parks in company with Miss
Mellor, preserving an attentive silence while that good lady quoted the
opinions of her friends, or paraphrased the leading articles in the
Radical press. Her first feeling towards this, the second of her
employers, had been largely tinged with impatience and lack of sympathy,
but as time went on, she relented somewhat in the hardness of her
judgment, and felt the dawning of a kindly pity. She was a very lonely
woman--this tall angular spinster who talked so loudly of her rights;
love had never come into her life, and in all the breadth of the land
she had hardly a relation whom she could take by the hand.

Once, in the middle of a heated argument on the suffrage, Miss Mellor
paused to look longingly at a curly-headed baby toddling across the
path; and beside the duck-pond in Regent's Park she invariably lost the
thread of her argument in watching the crowds of merry children feeding
their pets. Norah reflected that had Miss Mellor been a happy wife and
mother she might not have troubled her head about a vote. All the same,
the result of education on the woman's question had been to convince
Norah that the demand for "rights" had been founded on some very
definite wrongs. After the long walk the two ladies would return to tea
in the flat, where the companion consumed the wafer-like bread and
butter and dainty cakes with Philistine enjoyment, and even Miss Mellor
herself descended from her high horse, and inquired curiously:

"Where do you get your hats?"

Of her two employers Norah had distinct preference for the old lady,
Mrs Baker. She was of a more lovable nature than the voluble Miss
Mellor, and, moreover, as she herself had announced--she had a nephew!
The nephew was a handsome, well-set-up man of thirty, who possessed
considerable culture and refinement, and a most ingratiating kindliness
of demeanour towards his homely old aunt.

The first Sunday after Norah entered upon her duties, young Mr Baker
did not call at Berrington Square; on the second Sunday he came to
midday dinner; on the third, he met the two ladies at the church door
after morning service, and remained with them for the whole of the
afternoon; on the fourth, he was already seated in the pew w