of the fire, sat musing.

For nearly six years now she and Nan had shared the flat they were living
in. When they had first joined forces, Nan had been at the beginning of
her career as a pianist and was still studying, while Penelope, her
senior by five years, had already been before the public as a singer for
some considerable time. With the outbreak of the war, they had both
thrown themselves heartily into war work of various kinds, reserving only
a certain portion of their time for professional purposes. The double
work had proved a considerable strain on each of them, and now that the
war was past it seemed as though Nan, at least, were incapable of getting
a fresh grip on things.

Luckily--or, from some points of view, unluckily--she was the recipient
of an allowance of three hundred a year from a wealthy and benevolent
uncle. Without this, the two girls might have found it difficult to
weather the profitless intervals which punctuated their professional
engagements. But with this addition to their income they rubbed along
pretty well, and contrived to find a fair amount of amusement in life
through the medium of their many friends in London.

Penelope, the elder of the two by five years, was the daughter of a
country rector, long since dead. She had known the significance of the
words "small means" all her life, and managed the financial affairs of
the little menage in Edenhall Mansions with creditable success. Whereas
Nan Davenant, flung at her parents' death from the shelter of a home
where wealth and reckless expenditure had prevailed, knew less than
nothing of the elaborate art of cutting one's coat according to the
cloth. Nor could she ever be brought to understand that there are only
twenty shillings in a pound--and that at the present moment even twenty
shillings were worth considerably less than they appeared to be.

There are certain people in the world who seem cast for the part of
onlooker. Of these Penelope was one. Evenly her life had slipped along
with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses,
entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the
lives of some. Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on.

Naturally of an observant turn of mind, she had learned to penetrate the
veil that hangs behind the actions of humanity, into the secret,
temperamental places whence those actions emanate, and had achieved a
somewhat rare comprehensi