beating about the bush--I lost everything! Everything!"

"Everything?"

"Everything! It's all gone! All fooled away. It's a terrible business.
This house will have to go."

"But--but doesn't the house belong to me?"

"I was your trustee, dear." Uncle Chris smoked furiously. "Thank
heaven you're going to marry a rich man!"

Jill stood looking at him, perplexed. Money, as money, had never
entered into her life. There were things one wanted which had to be
paid for with money, but Uncle Chris had always looked after that. She
had taken them for granted.

"I don't understand," she said.

And then suddenly she realized that she did, and a great wave of pity
for Uncle Chris flooded over her. He was such an old dear. It must be
horrible for him to have to stand there, telling her all this. She
felt no sense of injury, only the discomfort of having to witness the
humiliation of her oldest friend. Uncle Chris was bound up
inextricably with everything in her life that was pleasant. She could
remember him, looking exactly the same, only with a thicker and wavier
crop of hair, playing with her patiently and unwearied for hours in
the hot sun, a cheerful martyr. She could remember sitting up with him
when she came home from her first grownup dance, drinking cocoa and
talking and talking and talking till the birds outside sang the sun
high up into the sky and it was breakfast time. She could remember
theatres with him, and jolly little suppers afterwards; expeditions
into the country, with lunches at queer old inns; days on the river,
days at Hurlingham, days at Lords', days at the Academy. He had always
been the same, always cheerful, always kind. He was Uncle Chris, and
he would always be Uncle Chris, whatever he had done or whatever he
might do. She slipped her arm in his and gave it a squeeze.

"Poor old thing!" she said.

Uncle Chris had been looking straight out before him with those fine
blue eyes of his. There had been just a touch of sternness in his
attitude. A stranger, coming into the room at that moment, would have
said that here was a girl trying to coax her blunt, straightforward,
military father into some course of action of which his honest nature
disapproved. He might have been posing for a statue of Rectitude. As
Jill spoke, he seemed to cave in.

"Poor old thing?" he repeated limply.

"Of course you are! And stop trying to look dignified and tragic!
Because it doesn't suit you. You're much too well