that duck of a service, and wear your heliotrope gown. You look so
_distingue_ in it, and dear Lady MacDonald notices clothes."

"Any more orders?" asks Eleanor, laughing.

Giddy's glance sweeps over the room.

"Yes. Remove that awful photograph, the one of the old people outside
a farmhouse. It is not ornamental, and quite spoils the beauty of that
corner. Lady MacDonald is so critical it might catch her eye."

"Then she will have to sit with her back to it or suffer," replies
Eleanor staunchly. "It is my favourite picture, and I don't mean to
take it down."

Giddy sighs, puts on a martyred expression, and kicks the footstool.

"Your taste is as terrible as ever," she declares sadly, shaking her
head. "What would you have been, Eleanor, if I hadn't taken you in
hand?"

"I don't know, dear," she cries, feeling she has been ungrateful. "You
have done me no end of good turns! But I love that portrait, it is
sentiment."

"An old nurse of yours and her husband?" asks Giddy.

Eleanor flushes rosy red.

She would like to say "my parents," but dreads Giddy's cynical smile.
She could not bear to hear them scoffed at, even in their absence.

Instead she murmurs:

"That woman nursed me in her arms as a baby, tended me in
childhood--loved me always."

Eleanor, on tiptoe, kisses the two faces in the photo.

"They are good," she says, "generous, kind-hearted; they might grace
the grandest palace----"

"And smile at the claims of long descent," quotes the widow. "What a
true little woman you are, Eleanor! Sometimes I half envy you,
_gaucheries_ and all!"

"I can't help being stupid, Giddy; I was not born wise, like you."

"Yet you really have developed marvellously under my training. The way
you kept up the conversation at that dull luncheon party last week was
admirable. I could not have done it better myself. As it was, a
wretched sore throat condemned me to silence. How your badinage with
Quinton astonished our hostess! She sat up so straight in her chair, I
thought her fringe curls would reach the ceiling. She will never
invite you there again, but it was simply splendid.

"'What do you think of Mrs. Roche?' I asked her afterwards, when Carol
was bending over you in the window seat. She drew in her thin lips,
and muttered: '_Most_ refreshing!' in a tone that meant something very
different."

"What did it mean?" cries Eleanor, with a gasp.

"I am in too great a hurry now to interpret," a