cures them. She cured Charlie Lumley of insomnia at Saint Moritz three years ago.”

Mrs. Aldesey, at this, looked at him for some moments in silence. “Yes,” she assented, and in her pause she seemed to have recognized and placed a familiar object. “Yes. She would. That’s just what Mrs. Toner’s daughter would do. I hope she doesn’t warble, too. Laying on hands is better than warbling.”

“I see you think it hopeless,” said Oldmeadow, pushing back his chair and yielding, as he thrust his hands into his pockets and stretched out his legs, to an avowed chagrin. “What a pity it is! A thousand pities. They are such dear, good, simple people, and Barney, though he doesn’t know it, is as simple as any of them. What will become of them with this overwhelming cuckoo in their nest.”

At this Mrs. Aldesey became serious. “I don’t think it hopeless at all. You misunderstand me. Isn’t the fact that he’s in love with her reassuring in itself? He may be simple, but he’s a delicate, discerning creature, and he couldn’t fall in love with some one merely pretentious and absurd. She may be charming. I can perfectly imagine her as charming, and there’s no harm in laying on hands; there may be good. Don’t be narrow, Roger. Don’t go down there feeling dry.”

“I am narrow, and I do feel dry; horribly dry,” said Oldmeadow. “How could the child of such a mother, and of tooth-paste, be charming? Don’t try specious consolation, now, after having more than justified all my suspicions.”

“I’m malicious, not specious; and I can’t resist having my fling. But you mustn’t be narrow and take me au pied de la lettre. I assert that she may be charming. I assert that I can see it all working out most happily. She’ll lay her hands on them and they’ll love her. What I really want to say is this: don’t try to set Barney against her. He’ll marry her all the same and never forgive you.”

“Ah; there we have the truth of it. But Barney would always forgive me,” said Oldmeadow.

“Well then, she won’t. And you’d lose him just as surely. And she’ll know. Let me warn you of that. She’ll know perfectly.”

“I’ll keep my hands off her,” said Oldmeadow, “if she doesn’t try to lay hers on me.”

CHAPTER III

THE Chadwicks all had a certain sulkiness in their charming looks, and where in Barney it mingled with sweetness, in Palgrave, his younger brother, it mingled with brilliancy. It was Palgrave who, at the station, met the family friend and counsellor in the shabby, inexpensive family car. He was still a mere boy, home from Marlborough for the Easter holidays; fond of Oldmeadow, as all the Chadwicks were; but more resentful of his predominance than Barney and more indifferent to his brotherly solicitude. He had Barney’s long, narrow face and Barney’s eyes and lips; but the former were proud and the latter petulant. To-day, as he sat beside him in the car, Oldmeadow was aware of something at once fixed and vibrating in his bearing. He wanted to say something, and he had resolved to be silent. During their last encounter at Coldbrooks, he and Oldmeadow had had a long, antagonistic political discussion, and Palgrave’s resentment still, no doubt, survived.

Coldbrooks lay among the lower Cotswolds, three miles from the station, and near the station was the village of Chelford where Nancy Averil and her mother lived. Nancy was at Coldbrooks; Aunt Monica—she was called aunt by the Chadwick children, though she and Mrs. Chadwick were first cousins—was away. So Palgrave informed him. But he did not speak again until the chill, green curve of arable hill-side was climbed and a stretch of wind-swept country lay before them. Then suddenly he volunteered: “The American girl is at Coldbrooks.”

“Oh! Is she? When did she come?” Somehow Oldmeadow had expected the later train for Miss Toner.

“Yesterday. She and Barney came down together in her car.”

“So you’ve welcomed her already,” said Oldmeadow, curious of the expression on the boy’s face. “How does she fit into Coldbrooks? Does she like you all and do you like her?”

For a moment Palgrave was silent. “You mean it makes a difference whether we do or not?” he then inquired.

“I don’t know that I meant that. Though if people come into your life it does make a difference.”

“And is she going to come into our lives?” Palgrave asked, and Oldmeadow felt pressure of some sort behind the question. “That’s what I mean. Has Barney told you? He’s said nothing to us. Not even to Mother.”

“Has Barney told me he’s going to marry her? No; he hasn’t. But it’s evident he hopes to. Perhaps it depends on whether she likes Coldbrooks and Coldbrooks likes her.”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t. It doesn’t depend on anything at all except whether she likes Barney,” said Palgrave. “She’s the sort of person who doesn’t depend on anything or anybody except herself. She cuts through circumstance like a knife through cheese. And if she’s not going to take him I wish she’d never come,” he added, frowning and turning, under the peak of his cap, his jewel-like eyes upon his companion. “It’s a case of all or nothing with a person like that. It’s too disturbing—just for a glimpse.”

Oldmeadow felt himself disconcerted. Oddly enough, for the boy was capricious and extravagant, Palgrave’s opinion had more weight with him than Barney’s. Barney, for one thing, was sexually susceptible and Palgrave was not. Though so young, Oldmeadow felt him already of a poetic temperament, passionate in mind and cold in blood.

“She’s so charming? You can’t bear to lose her now you’ve seen her?” he asked.

“I don’t know about charming. No; I don’t think her charming. At least not if you mean something little by the word. She’s disturbing. She changes everything.”

“But if she stays she’ll be more disturbing. She’ll change more.”

“Oh, I shan’t mind that! I shan’t mind change,” Palgrave declared. “If it’s her change and she’s there to see it through.” And, relapsing to muteness, he bent to his brakes and they slid down among the woods of Coldbrooks.

For the life of him and with the best will in the world, he couldn’t make it out. That was Oldmeadow’s first impression as, among the familiar group gathered in the hall about the tea-table, Miss Toner was at last made manifest to him. She was, he felt sure, in his first shrewd glance at her, merely what Lydia Aldesey would have placed as a third-rate American girl, and her origins in commercial enterprise were eminently appropriate.

She got up to meet him, as if recognizing in him some special significance or, indeed, as it might be her ingenuous habit to do in meeting any older person. But he was not so much older if it came to that; for, after he had met the direct and dwelling gaze of her large, light eyes, the second impression was that she was by no means so young as Barney had led him to expect. She was certainly as old as Barney.

There were none of the obvious marks of wealth upon her. She wore a dark-blue dress tying on the breast over white. She was small in stature and, in manner, composed beyond anything he had ever encountered. With an irony, kindly enough, yet big, he knew, with unfavourable inferences, he even recognized, reconstructing the moment in the light of those that followed, that in rising to meet him as he was named to her, it had been, rather than in shyness or girlishness, in the wish to welcome him and draw him the more happily into a group she had already made her own.

They were all sitting round the plentiful table, set with home-made loaves and cakes, jams and butter, and a Leeds bowl of primroses; Miss Toner just across from him, Barney on