I took it on there has been an increase,
and I'll be frightfully disappointed if you let it go back."

Mrs. Jowett looked depressed. She knew herself to be one of the worst
collectors on record. She was guiltily aware that she often advised
people not to give; that is, if she thought their circumstances
straitened!

"I don't know," she began, "I'm afraid I could never sit in a stranger's
house and insist on being given money. It's so--so high-handed, like a
highwayman or something."

"Think of the cause," said Mrs. Duff-Whalley, "not of your own
feelings."

"Yes, of course, but ... well, if there is a deficit, I can always raise
my own subscription to cover it." She smiled happily at this solution of
the problem.

Mrs. Duff-Whalley sniffed.

"'The conies are a feeble folk,'" she quoted rudely. "Well, good-bye. I
shall send over all the papers and collecting books to-morrow. Muriel
and I go off to London on Friday _en route_ for the south. It will be
pleasant to have a change and meet some interesting people. Muriel was
just saying it's a cabbage's life we live in Priorsford. I often wonder
we stay here...."

Mrs. Duff-Whalley went home a very angry woman. After dinner, sitting
with Muriel before the fire in the glittering drawing-room, she
discussed the matter.

"I know what'll be the end of it," she said. "You saw what a fuss Miss
Reston made of Jean the other day when we called? Depend upon it, she
knew the money was coming. I dare say she and her brother are as poor as
church mice--those aristocrats usually are--and Jean's money will come
in useful. Oh, we'll see her Lady Bidborough yet.... I tell you what it
is, Muriel, the way this world's managed is past speaking about."

Mrs. Duff-Whalley was knitting a stocking for her son Gordon (her hands
were seldom idle), and she waved it in her exasperation as she talked.

"Here are you, meant, as anyone can see, for the highest position, and
instead that absurd little Jean is to be cocked up, a girl with no more
dignity than a sparrow, who couldn't keep her place with a washerwoman.
I've heard her talking to these cottage women as if they were her
sisters."

Muriel leant back in her chair and seemed absorbed in balancing her
slipper on her toe.

"My dear mother," she said, "why excite yourself? It isn't clever of you
to be so openly annoyed. People will laugh. I don't say I like it any
better than you do, but I hope I have the sense to purr congratulations