hands in the pockets of her tweed jacket. Tatham saw at once
that something had happened.

She put her hands on his shoulders, kissed him, and delivered her news.
She did so with a peculiar and secret zest. To watch how he took the
fresh experiences of life, and to be exultantly proud and sure of him the
while, was all part of her adoration of him.

"Melrose's wife and daughter! Great Scot! So they're not dead?" Tatham
stood amazed.

"He seems to have done his best to kill them. They're starved--and
destitute. But here they are."

"And why in the name of fortune do they come to us?"

"We are cousins, my dear--and I saw her twenty years ago. It isn't a bad
move. Indeed the foolish woman might have come before."

"But what on earth can we do for them?"

The young man sat down bewildered, while his mother told the story,
piecing it together from the rambling though copious narrative, which she
had gathered that morning from Netta in her bed, where she had been
forced to remain, at least for breakfast.

After her flight, Melrose's fugitive wife had settled down with her child
in Florence, under the wing of her own family. But they were a shiftless,
importunate crew, and, in the course of years, every one of them came
more or less visibly to grief. Her sisters married men of the same
dubious world as themselves, and were always in difficulties. Netta's
eldest brother got into trouble with the bank where he was employed, and
another brother, as a deserter from the army, had to make his escape to
South America. The father, Robert Smeath, had found it more and more
difficult to earn anything on which to keep his belongings, and as a
picture dealer seemed to have fallen into bad odour with the Italian
authorities, for reasons of which Netta could give no account.

"And how much do you think Mr. Melrose allowed his wife and child?" asked
Victoria, her eyes sparkling. "_Eighty pounds a year_!--on which in the
end the whole family seem to have lived. Finally, the mother died, and
Mr. Smeath got into some scrape or other--I naturally avoided the
particulars--which involved pledging half Mrs. Melrose's allowance for
five years. And on the rest--forty pounds--she and her daughter, and her
old father have been trying to live for the last two. You never heard
such a story! They found a small half-ruined villa in the mountains north
of Pisa, and there they somehow existed. They couldn't afford nursing or
doctoring for the old f