ously, called to her:

"Where are you off to, Ethel?"

She looked down at him and a glow, all unsuspected, came into her eyes
and a line of colour ran through her cheeks, and there was an unusual
tremor in her voice, as she replied:

"To try to make up my mind, if I can, about something. The coming of
PEG may do it for me."

She went on out of sight.

Alaric was half-inclined to follow her. He knew she was taking their
bad luck to heart withal she said so little. He was really quite fond
of Ethel in a selfish, brotherly way. But for the moment he decided to
let Ethel worry it out alone while he would go to the railway station
and meet his friend's train. He called to his mother as she passed
through the door:

"Wait a minute, mater, and I'll go with you as far as the station-road
and see if I can head Jerry off. His train is almost due if it's
punctual."

He was genuinely concerned that his old chum should not meet that
impossible little red-headed Irish heathen whom an unkind fate had
dropped down in their midst.

At the hall-door Mrs. Chichester told Jarvis that her niece was not to
leave her room without permission.

As Mrs. Chichester and Alaric passed out they little dreamt that the
same relentless fate was planning still further humiliations for the
unfortunate family and through the new and unwelcome addition to it.

CHAPTER VI

JERRY

Peg was shown by the maid, Bennett, into a charming old-world room
overlooking the rose garden. Everything about it was in the most
exquisite taste. The furniture was of white and gold, the vases of
Sevres, a few admirable prints on the walls and roses everywhere.

Left to her reflections, poor Peg found herself wondering how people,
with so much that was beautiful around them, could live and act as the
Chichester family apparently did. They seemed to borrow nothing from
their once illustrious and prosperous dead. They were, it would appear,
only concerned with a particularly near present.

The splendour of the house awed--the narrowness of the people irritated
her. What an unequal condition of things where such people were endowed
with so much of the world's goods, while her father had to struggle all
his life for the bare necessities!

She had heard her father say once that the only value money had,
outside of one's immediate requirements, was to be able to relieve
other people's misery: and that if we just spent it on ourselves money
became a monster