lways
such an affectionate girl."

"I don't believe it now," replied Betty sharply. "Rosy couldn't grow
hateful and stuck up. It's that nasty Nigel I know it is."

Sir Nigel's intention was that there should be as little intercourse
between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible. Among other
things, he did not intend that a lot of American relations should come
tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it,
and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote
to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself
civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage
in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their
child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to
and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find
that Rosalie never condescended to make any response to her tentatives
concerning her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact
that the journey "to Europe" was never spoken of.

"I don't see why they never seem to think of coming over," she said
plaintively one day. "They used to talk so much about it."

"They?" ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. "Whom may you mean?"

"Mother and father and Betty and some of the others."

Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.

"The whole family?" she inquired.

"There are not so many of them," Rosalie answered.

"A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is
married," observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over the top of
his Times.

"I may as well tell you that it would not do at all," he put in.

"Why--why not?" exclaimed Rosalie, aghast.

"Americans don't do in English society," slightingly.

"But they are coming over so much. They like London so--all Americans
like London."

"Do they?" with a drawl which made Rosalie blush until the tears started
to her eyes. "I am afraid the sentiment is scarcely mutual."

Rosalie turned and fled from the room. She turned and fled because she
realised that she should burst out crying if she waited to hear another
word, and she realised that of late she seemed always to be bursting out
crying before one or the other of those two. She could not help it. They
always seemed to be implying something slighting or scathing. They were
always putting her in the wrong and hurting her feelings.

The day was damp and