ge--she looked
exceptionally well. But when after breakfast she said to him, "Come in
here, Val," and led the way to the drawing-room, he was at once beset by
qualms. Winifred carefully shut the door and passed her handkerchief
over her lips; inhaling the violette de Parme with which it had been
soaked, Val thought: 'Has she found out about Holly?'

Her voice interrupted

"Are you going to be nice to me, dear boy?"

Val grinned doubtfully.

"Will you come with me this morning...."

"I've got to see...." began Val, but something in her face stopped him.
"I say," he said, "you don't mean...."

"Yes, I have to go to the Court this morning." Already!--that d---d
business which he had almost succeeded in forgetting, since nobody ever
mentioned it. In self-commiseration he stood picking little bits of skin
off his fingers. Then noticing that his mother's lips were all awry, he
said impulsively: "All right, mother; I'll come. The brutes!" What
brutes he did not know, but the expression exactly summed up their joint
feeling, and restored a measure of equanimity.

"I suppose I'd better change into a 'shooter,"' he muttered, escaping to
his room. He put on the 'shooter,' a higher collar, a pearl pin, and his
neatest grey spats, to a somewhat blasphemous accompaniment. Looking at
himself in the glass, he said, "Well, I'm damned if I'm going to show
anything!" and went down. He found his grandfather's carriage at the
door, and his mother in furs, with the appearance of one going to a
Mansion House Assembly. They seated themselves side by side in the
closed barouche, and all the way to the Courts of Justice Val made but
one allusion to the business in hand. "There'll be nothing about those
pearls, will there?"

The little tufted white tails of Winifred's muff began to shiver.

"Oh, no," she said, "it'll be quite harmless to-day. Your grandmother
wanted to come too, but I wouldn't let her. I thought you could take
care of me. You look so nice, Val. Just pull your coat collar up a
little more at the back--that's right."

"If they bully you...." began Val.

"Oh! they won't. I shall be very cool. It's the only way."

"They won't want me to give evidence or anything?"

"No, dear; it's all arranged." And she patted his hand. The determined
front she was putting on it stayed the turmoil in Val's chest, and he
busied himself in drawing his gloves off and on. He had taken what he
now saw was the wrong p