said to himself--"uncommonly strenuous. How
many times a week shall I have to do it? Can't Cynthia Welwyn do
anything? I'll go and see Cynthia this afternoon."

With which very natural, but quite foolish resolution, he at last
succeeded in quieting his own irritation, and turning his mind to a
political speech he had to make next week in his own village.

CHAPTER V

Cynthia Welwyn was giving an account of her evening at Beechmark to her
elder sister, Lady Georgina. They had just met in the little drawing-room
of Beechmark Cottage, and tea was coming in. It would be difficult to
imagine a greater contrast than the two sisters presented. They were the
daughters of a peer belonging to what a well-known frequenter of great
houses and great families before the war used to call "the inferior
aristocracy"--with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great
families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his
name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian
days--parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency,
who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of
a little war, and had then incontinently died, leaving his family his
reputation, which was considerable, and his savings, which were
disappointingly small. Lady Cynthia and Lady Georgina were his only
surviving children, and the earldom was extinct.

The sisters possessed a tiny house in Brompton Square, and rented
Beechmark Cottage from Lord Buntingford, of whom their mother, long since
dead, had been a cousin. The cottage stood within the enclosure of the
park, and to their connection with the big house the sisters owed a
number of amenities,--game in winter, flowers and vegetables in
summer--which were of importance to their small income. Cynthia Welwyn,
however, could never have passed as anybody's dependent. She thanked her
cousin occasionally for the kindnesses of which his head gardener and his
game-keeper knew much more than he did; and when he said
impatiently--"Please never thank for that sort of thing!" she dropped the
subject as lightly as she had raised it. Secretly she felt that such
things, and much more, were her due. She had not got from life all she
should have got; and it was only natural that people should make it up to
her a little.

For Cynthia, though she had wished to marry, was unmarried, and a secret
and melancholy conviction now sometimes po