and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of
life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of
cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a
comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however,
she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women
poorer than herself to benefit by it.

She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious
illness of her next-door neighbor--Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a
small post in the British Museum--had prevented her from visiting Oxford
during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have
been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper
to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going
sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly
neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which
she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her
long neglect of her friend.

It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burt was still at Ascham and
Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the
Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned
towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded
her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss
about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed
to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when
she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and
dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse
happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months,
was sitting on the drawing-room floor.

The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a
gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept
working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a
knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her
skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected
picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the
box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to
hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until
it jumped up with a bang--a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles,
and scarlet snout--to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune