illy, as they walked down
Oldcastle Street.

'Your father said we must be polite to Mr. Twemlow,' her mother replied
coldly.

'He's frightfully rich, I'm sure,' Milly observed.

At dinner Leonora told John that Arthur Twemlow was coming.

'Oh, good!' he said: nothing more.

* * * * *

In the afternoon the mother and her eldest and youngest, supine and
exanimate in the drawing-room, were surprised into expectancy by the
sound of the front-door bell before three o'clock.

'He's here!' exclaimed Milly, who was sitting near Leonora on the long
Chesterfield. Ethel, her face flushed by the fire, lay like a curving
wisp of straw in John's vast arm-chair. Leonora was reading; she put
down the magazine and glanced briefly at Ethel, then at the aspect of
the room. In silence she wished that Ethel's characteristic attitudes
could be a little more demure and sophisticated. She wondered how often
this apparently artless girl had surreptitiously seen Fred Ryley since
the midnight meeting on Thursday, and she was amazed that a child of
hers, so kindly disposed, could be so naughty and deceitful. The door
opened and Ethel sat up with a bound.

'Mr. Burgess,' the parlourmaid announced. The three women sank back,
disappointed and yet relieved.

Harry Burgess, though barely of age, was one of the acknowledged dandies
of Hillport. Slim and fair, with a frank, rather simple countenance, he
supported his stylistic apparel with a natural grace that attracted
sympathy. Just at present he was achieving a spirited effect by always
wearing an austere black necktie fastened with a small gold safety-pin;
he wore this necktie for weeks to a bewildering variety of suits, and
then plunged into a wild polychromatic debauch of neckties. Upon all the
niceties of masculine dress, the details of costume proper to a
particular form of industry or recreation or ceremonial, he was a
genuine authority. His cricketing flannels--he was a fine cricketer and
lawn-tennis player of the sinuous oriental sort--were the despair of
other dandies and the scorn of the sloven; he caused the material,
before it was made up, to be boiled for many hours by the Burgess
charwoman under his own superintendence. He had extraordinary aptitudes
for drawing corks, lacing boots, putting ferrules on walking-sticks,
opening latched windows from the outside, and rolling cigarettes; he
could make a cigarette with one hand, and not another man in