ttle on one side, her tone low and beguiling:

"When you come back, will you teach me to ride? Lady Tatham
said--perhaps--"

Tatham was embarrassed--and bored--by the request.

"I have no doubt we can find you a pony," he said evasively, and taking
up the Bradshaw he walked away.

Felicia stood alone and motionless in the big hall, amid its
Gainsboroughs and Romneys, its splendid cabinets and tapestries, a
childish figure in a blue dress, with crimson cheeks, and compressed
lips. Suddenly she ran up to a mirror on the wall, and looked at herself
vindictively.

"It is because you are so ugly," she said to the image in the glass.
"Ugh, you are so ugly! And yet I can't have yellow hair like that
other girl. If I dyed it, he would know--he would laugh. And she is all
round and soft; but my bones are all sticking out! I might be cut out of
wood. Ah"--her wild smile broke out--"I know what I'll do! I'll drink
_panna_--cream they call it here. Every night at tea they bring in what
would cost a _lira_ in Florence. I'll drink a whole cup of it!--I'll eat
pounds of butter--and lots, lots of pudding--that's what makes English
people fat. I'll be fat too. You'll see!" And she threw a threatening nod
at the scarecrow reflected in the tortoise-shell mirror.

The October evening had fallen when Tatham put his mother into the motor,
and stood, his hands in his pockets--uncomfortable and disapproving--on
the steps of Duddon, watching the bright lights disappearing down the
long avenue. What could she do? He hated to think of her in the old
miser's house, browbeaten and perhaps insulted, when he was not there to
protect her.

However she was gone, on what he was certain would prove a futile errand,
and he turned heavily back into the house.

The head keeper was waiting in the inner hall, in search of orders for a
small "shoot" of neighbours on the morrow, planned some weeks before.

"Arrange it as you like, Thurston!" said Tatham hurriedly, as he came in
sight of the man, a magnificent grizzled fellow in gaiters and a green
uniform. "I don't care where we go."

"I thought perhaps the Colley Wood beat, my lord--"

"Yes, capital. That'll do. I leave it to you. Sorry I can't stay to talk
it over. Good-night!"

"There's a pair of foxes, my lord, in the Nowers spinney that have been
doing a shocking amount of damage lately...."

But the door of the library was already shut. Thurston went away, both
astonished and aggrieved. Th