a nice thing
sometimes.'

'Nicer than _eau rougie_; I'm afraid she's _eau rougie_.'

'_Eau rougie_ may be nice, too, if one is tired and thirsty and needs
mild refreshment, not altogether tasteless, and not at all intoxicating.
She was certainly that to me. I was very much touched by her kindness.'

'I shall be touched if she'll take Merriston. I'm fearfully hard up. I
suppose it would only be a little let; but that would be better than
nothing.'

'She might stay for the winter if she liked it. I shan't try to make her
like it, but I'll do my best to make her stay on if she does, and with a
clear conscience, for I think that her staying will depend on her seeing
me.'

'Wouldn't that mean that she'd be a great deal on your hands?'

'I shouldn't mind that; we get on very well. She will be here next week,
you know. You must come to tea and meet her.'

'Well, I don't know. I don't think that I'm particularly eager to meet
her,' Gerald confessed jocosely.

'You'll have to meet her a good deal if you are to see much of me,' said
Helen; on which he owned that, with that compulsion put upon him, he
and Miss Jakes might become intimates.

Gerald Digby was a young man who did very little work. He had been
vaguely intended, by an affectionate but haphazard family, for the
diplomatic service, but it was found, after he had done himself some
credit at Eton and Oxford, that the family resources didn't admit of
this obviously suitable career for him; and an aged and wealthy uncle,
who had been looked to confidently for succour, married at the moment,
most unfeelingly, so that Gerald's career had to be definitely
abandoned. Another relation found him a berth in the City, where he
might hope to amass quite a fortune; but Gerald soon said that he far
preferred poverty. He thought that he would like to paint and be an
artist; he had a joyful eye for delicate, minute forms of beauty, and
was most happily occupied when absorbed in Japanese-like studies of
transient loveliness--a bird in flight, a verdant grasshopper on a
wheat-blade, the tangled festoons of a wild convolvulus spray. His
talent, however, though genuine, could hardly supply him with a
livelihood, and he would have been seriously put to it had not his
father's death left him a tiny income, while a half-informal
secretaryship to a political friend, offered him propitiously at the
same time, gave him leisure for his painting as well as for a good many
other pleasant