is
strength seldom appeared now. The green room was Christie's
acknowledged domain. The "masterful" Clement was taught that he was
only admitted there on condition of good behaviour; and really,
considering all things, he was very good. He was encouraged to be much
in the green room during those rainy days, for his merry ways and
pleasant childish talk did his little brother a great deal of good.

As for Miss Gertrude, I am sorry to say she did not recover her
good-humour so soon as she ought to have done. She did not resent what
she called Christie's reproof about the book half so much as she did her
slowness in responding to her offered sympathy about the letter. She
fancied that the little nurse ought to have been very much flattered by
the interest she had tried to show in her affairs, and was displeased at
the silence with which her advances had been received.

Poor Christie had offended very unconsciously. With her mind full of
her letter and all the associations it had awakened, she had been quite
unmindful of Miss Gertrude and her attempts to make up the little
falling-out of the morning. She only began to realise that the young
lady must have been offended, when the days passed over with only a
brief visit to Claude. Even then she believed that her vexation rose
from what had passed about the book.

But Miss Gertrude was very much out of sorts with herself too. If it
had not been a rainy day, she would have availed herself of her Aunt
Barbara's invitation to spend the day with her. But a rainy day at Aunt
Barbara's was not to be thought of. She took a long time to write a
short letter to Mrs Seaton, in Scotland. Then she took a fit of
practising her music, which, she said to herself, she had sadly
neglected of late. Then she read a little. Then she went into the
kitchen and superintended the making of a pudding after a new recipe
which some one had given to her.

Then she dressed for dinner. But the time is very long from nine in the
morning till six at night, when it is rainy without and gloomy within.
It wanted full an hour of the usual time for her father's return when
she was quite ready to receive him. She wandered into the dining-room.
There were no signs of the dinner-table being laid. She wandered into
the drawing-room, and passed her fingers over the keys of the piano once
or twice. But she could not settle to steady playing, or, indeed, to
anything else.

"I wonder what has bec