ish ghost;
that his walls, seemingly covered with coarse-coloured prints
of wooden-looking horses, simpering ballet girls and petrified
prize-fighters, were in reality a delicate tone of lavender and maple
green; that at her writing-table in the sunlit window sat my mother, her
soft curls curtaining her quiet face.

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE SHADOW THAT CAME BETWEEN THE MAN IN GREY AND THE LADY OF THE
LOVE-LIT EYES.

"There's nothing missing," said my mother, "so far as I can find out.
Depend upon it, that's the explanation: she has got frightened and has
run away.

"But what was there to frighten her?" said my father, pausing with a
decanter in one hand and the bottle in the other.

"It was the idea of the thing," replied my mother. "She has never been
used to waiting at table. She was actually crying about it only last
night."

"But what's to be done?" said my father. "They will be here in less than
an hour."

"There will be no dinner for them," said my mother, "unless I put on an
apron and bring it up myself."

"Where does she live?" asked my father.

"At Ilford," answered my mother.

"We must make a joke of it," said my father.

My mother, sitting down, began to cry. It had been a trying week for my
mother. A party to dinner--to a real dinner, beginning with anchovies
and ending with ices from the confectioner's; if only they would remain
ices and not, giving way to unaccustomed influences, present themselves
as cold custard--was an extraordinary departure from the even tenor of
our narrow domestic way; indeed, I recollect none previous. First there
had been the house to clean and rearrange almost from top to bottom;
endless small purchases to be made of articles that Need never misses,
but which Ostentation, if ever you let her sneering nose inside the
door, at once demands. Then the kitchen range--it goes without saying:
one might imagine them all members of a stove union, controlled by some
agitating old boiler out of work--had taken the opportunity to strike,
refusing to bake another dish except under permanently improved
conditions, necessitating weary days with plumbers. Fat cookery books,
long neglected on their shelf, had been consulted, argued with and
abused; experiments made, failures sighed over, successes noted; cost
calculated anxiously; means and ways adjusted, hope finally achieved,
shadowed by fear.

And now with victory practically won, to have the reward thus dashed
from her hand a