t cramp," Derek muttered; "can't even give women votes. Fancy my
mother without a vote! And going to wait till every laborer is off the
land before it attends to them. It's like the port you gave us last
night, Uncle Felix, wonderful crust!"

"And what is to be your contribution to its renovation?"

Derek's face instantly resumed its peculiar defiant smile, and Felix
thought: 'Young beggar! He's as close as wax.' After their little talk,
however, he had more understanding of his nephew. His defiant
self-sufficiency seemed more genuine. . . .

In spite of his sensations when dining with Felix, John Freeland (little
if not punctilious) decided that it was incumbent on him to have the
'young Tods' to dinner, especially since Frances Freeland had come to
stay with him the day after the arrival of those two young people at
Hampstead. She had reached Porchester Gardens faintly flushed from the
prospect of seeing darling John, with one large cane trunk, and a
hand-bag of a pattern which the man in the shop had told her was the best
thing out. It had a clasp which had worked beautifully in the shop, but
which, for some reason, on the journey had caused her both pain and
anxiety. Convinced, however, that she could cure it and open the bag the
moment she could get to that splendid new pair of pincers in her trunk,
which a man had only yesterday told her were the latest, she still felt
that she had a soft thing, and dear John must have one like it if she
could get him one at the Stores to-morrow.

John, who had come away early from the Home Office, met her in that dark
hall, to which he had paid no attention since his young wife died,
fifteen years ago. Embracing him, with a smile of love almost timorous
from intensity, Frances Freeland looked him up and down, and, catching
what light there was gleaming on his temples, determined that she had in
her bag, as soon as she could get it open, the very thing for dear John's
hair. He had such a nice moustache, and it was a pity he was getting
bald. Brought to her room, she sat down rather suddenly, feeling, as a
fact, very much like fainting--a condition of affairs to which she had
never in the past and intended never in the future to come, making such a
fuss! Owing to that nice new patent clasp, she had not been able to get
at her smelling-salts, nor the little flask of brandy and the one
hard-boiled egg without which she never travelled; and for want of a cup
of tea her s