or two
innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had
produced a good deal of irritation.

Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance.

'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell
Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war
charities.'

'You mean because she costs so much?'

'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily.

'My hat!--and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond
indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash.
There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden.
The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off,
Forest tells me?'

'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather
pinched lips.

'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of
good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.'

'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I
liked.'

'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd
spent eighteen hundred at that sale.'

'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela
fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.'

Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure
in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind
his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a
year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the
mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In
both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as
indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any
suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a
soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way
to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in
a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at
school:

This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.

Had her mother been happy? That her children could never know.

Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared. It was impossible for
him to frown for long on any subject. He was very sorry for 'old
Pam.' His father's opinions and behaviour were too queer for words.
He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like
Pamela. But then he wasn't going to be long at home. He was going
off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him
wit