ose from
her chair, but appalled by the deathly silence and the look on the
girl's face, sank back, cowering in her seat, and stared in the
direction her niece's hand was pointing.

"Look, Auntie, look!"

Leonie stood with one hand pointing at the mantelpiece and the other
pressed against her throat as she tried to speak coherently.

The pupils of her eyes were pin-points as she gazed at a wooden frame
which, adorned with edelweiss and the Lucerne Lion, held the snapshot
of a complaisant individual leaning over the harbour wall, attired in a
well-fitting but ill-placed yachting suit.

"Old Pickled Walnuts! You want me to marry him--when--when--oh! when I
thought _he_ wanted to marry _you_!"

She laughed, a laugh which sounded like the jangling of broken glass,
and died almost before it was born; and her aunt, terrified at the
sound and the expression on the girl's face, seized the outstretched
arm and shook it violently.

"What _are_ you talking about, Leonie!"

Leonie freed her arm with a shudder.

"Please don't touch me!" Then making a desperate effort she continued
quietly, so quietly indeed that Susan Hetth looked anxiously over her
shoulder towards the door.

"Don't you know that's his nickname? Oh! of _course_ you do! You
_know_ he made his fortune by pickling walnuts too rotten to sell. Sir
Walter Hickle--twist the name a bit and it's all in a nutshell--a--a
pickled walnut shell"--the little unnatural laugh broke across the
words--"and you want _me_ to marry him--Auntie! Auntie! he's awful
enough, heaven knows, but not bad enough, nobody could be, to have a--a
mad wife foisted on him--no! never--I'll go out and work!"

There was something very decisive in the last words, but Susan Hetth,
like most weak people, found her strength suddenly in a mulish
obstinacy, which is a quite good equivalent for, and often more
efficacious than mere strength of will.

This obstinacy, backed by the knowledge that people were beginning to
gossip about the girl's aloofness and love of solitude; that the
cashing of another cheque would see her overdrawn at the bank; and that
until the girl was settled and off her hands she would not be able to
solve her own matrimonial problem, drove her to a show of mental energy
of which she would not have been capable in an everyday argument.

"Work!" she cried, "work! What can you do? _Nothing_--except go out
as a companion or nursery governess!--and who would take you wit