."

"Do you want the people in those awful little houses to see you
undressing?" demanded Miss Ethel.

"They couldn't--not unless they used a telescope or opera glasses,"
said Mrs. Bradford. And she managed to convey, by some subtle
inflexion of voice and expression--though she was a dull woman--that if
you had been married, you were not so pernickitty about such things;
and, finally, that if Emerald Avenue cared to go to that trouble it was
welcome, because she remained always invested with the mantle of Hymen.

As a matter of fact, she had--in a way--spent her life for some years
in echoing that romantic declaration of the lady in the play: "I have
lived and loved." Only she had never said anything so vivid as
that--she simply sat down on the fact for the rest of her life in a
sort of comatose triumph.

Her husband had been a short, weasely man of bilious temperament;
still, he sufficed; and his death at the end of two years from
whooping-cough only added to Mrs. Bradford's complacency. She came
back home again to the Cottage, feeling as immeasurably superior to her
unmarried sister as only a woman of that generation could feel, who had
found a husband while most of her female relatives remained spinsters.
She at once caused the late Mr. Bradford's photograph to be
enlarged--the one in profile where the eyebrows had been strengthened,
and the slight squint was of course invisible--and she referred to him
in conversation as "such a fine intellectual-looking man." After a
while, she began to believe her own words more and more thoroughly, so
that at the end of ten years she would not have recognized him at all
had he appeared in the flesh.

"At any rate," she remarked, "our field won't be built over."

"No, thank goodness!" assented Miss Ethel emphatically, her left
eyebrow twitching a little. "The Warringborns will never sell their
land, whatever other people do. I remember grandfather telling us how
he was ordered out of the room by old Squire Warringborn when he once
went to suggest buying this field. Oh, no; the Warringborns won't
sell. Not the least fear of that."

But she only talked in this way because she was afraid--trying to keep
her heart up, as she saw in her mind's eye that oncoming horde of
yellowish-red houses.

Before Mrs. Bradford could reply about the Warringborns, there came a
sound of voices in the great field which stretched park-like beyond the
privet hedge. "Butcher Walker putti