uite your sort." Fanny stared thoughtfully at
her cousin. "I don't know how it is, Toni--you are my cousin, your
father was Dad's own brother--and yet you're as different from us as--as
chalk from cheese."

She in her turn had uttered a profound truth. Between Toni and the rest
of the commonplace lower-middle-class household was a great gulf fixed,
a gulf which was the more inexplicable because it was clearly visible to
the parties on either side of the chasm.

Red-faced, brawny Fred Gibbs, the butcher, his equally red-faced, though
slightly more refined wife, and their several sons and daughters,
belonging, most of them, to the category of "fine" boys and girls, were
a good-humoured, kindly people enough; yet between them and the pretty,
dark-eyed Antonia there was not the slightest vestige of resemblance,
either in looks, manners, or disposition.

Not that Toni gave herself airs. On the contrary, she was the most
cheerful and light-hearted little soul in the world. She flung herself
bodily into all the family's interests and pursuits, helped her uncle
with his books and her aunt with her housework, was Fanny's sworn
confidante and ally in all matters of the heart. The younger children
adored her for her good looks, her vivacity, her high spirits; and even
the flashes of rage which now and then marred her usually sunny temper
were fascinating in their very fire.

Yet--with it all she was not, never would be, one of them. Fanny was
inclined to put it down to her foreign blood--for Toni's mother had been
Italian. The elder Gibbs fancied the girl's superior education was
responsible--for Toni had been to a real "Seminary for Young Ladies," in
contradistinction to the Council School attended by her cousins; while
as for Toni herself, though she was as fully conscious as the rest that
she was "different, somehow," she could never say, with any certainty,
in what the difference lay.

Perhaps a psychologist would have found Antonia's position an
interesting one. Briefly, her history was this.

The Gibbs were North-Country people, a good old yeoman family who had
been in service with an older and more aristocratic people in the county
of Yorkshire. The family, however, had begun, a few generations back, to
die out. Instead of the usual lusty sons, only daughters had been born
to most of the Gibbs, and they in their turn married and died, in the
nature of things relinquishing their own name, until there were few
left.