because she was really quite ungracious about them, and hurt his feelings dreadfully. There was also some trouble about the gas man, which I didn't quite understand. But afterwards, when I had gone upstairs to take a last look at the children, they had a talk, and as I came downstairs I saw him kneeling in front of her with his head in her lap. He has such pretty curly hair, and when I came in he came to me and took my hand and said he didn't mind my seeing his tears, as I was the same as a sister, and asked me to help influence her to forgive him, and to begin over again. It was very touching, and I couldn't help crying a little. I was so sorry for him. Violet is really rather hard. I suggested to her that after all many nice people go bankrupt, and that other women have far worse things to bear, and she looked at me very oddly for a moment, almost as if she despised me, though it can't have been that....

September 30th, 1896.—Have been helping Violet move her things back into the downstairs room. Ferdie was so pleased. He brought home a great bunch of white lilac—in September!—and put it in a vase by the bed. I thought it was a lovely little attention.

July 4th, 1897.—A beautiful little boy came home this morning to "Happy House." They are going to call him Guy, which is Ferdie's favourite name. He was dreadfully disappointed it wasn't a little girl, so that she could be named Violet Peace. He's so romantic. What a pity there is no masculine name meaning Peace....

CHAPTER III

Mr. Oliver Wick's ideas of courtship were primitive and unshakable. On one or two clever, ingenious pretexts he visited "Happy House" twice within the month after his first visit, in order, as he expressed it to himself, to look over Miss Walbridge in the light of a possible wife. That he was in love with her he recognised, to continue using his own language, "from the drop of the hat," "from the first gun." But although he belonged to the most romantic race under the sun, Mr. Wick was no fool, and whereas anything like a help-meet would have displeased him almost to the point of disgust, he had certain standards to which any one with claims to be the future Mrs. Oliver Wick must more or less conform. He didn't care a bit about money—he felt that money was his job, not the girl's—but she'd got to be straight, she'd got to be a good looker, and she'd got to be good-tempered. No shrew-taming for him—at least not in his own domestic circle.

One evening, shortly after his third visit to "Happy House," the young man was standing at the tallboys in his mother's room in Spencer Crescent, Brondesbury, tying a new tie over an immaculate dress shirt.

"I'm going to do the trick to-night," he declared, filled with pleasant confidence, "or bust."

Mrs. Wick, who looked more like her son's grandmother than his mother, sat in a low basket chair by the window, stretching, with an old, thin pair of olive-wood glove stretchers, the new white gloves that were to put the final touch of splendour to the wooer's appearance.

She was a pleasant-faced old woman, with a strong chin and keen, clear eyes, and when she smiled she showed traces of past beauty.

"Well, of course," she said, snapping the glove-stretchers at him thoughtfully, "you know everything—you always did—and far be it from me to make any suggestions to you."

He turned round, grinning, his ugly face full of subtle likeness to her handsome one.

"Oh, go on," he jeered, "you wonderful old thing! Some day your pictures will be in the penny papers as the mother of Baron Wick of Brondesbury. Of course I know everything! Look at this tie, for instance. A Piccadilly tie, built for dukes, tied in Brondesbury by Fleet Street. What's his name—D'Orsay—couldn't do it better. But what were you going to say?"

She laughed and held out the gloves. "Here you are, son. Only this. I bet you sixpence she won't look at you. She'll turn you down; refuse you; give you the cold hand; icy mit—what d'you call it? And then, you'll come back and weep on my shoulder."

Mr. Wick, who had taken the gloves, stood still for a minute, his face full of sudden thought.

"She may," he said, "she may. I don't care if she does. I tell you she's lovely, mother. She'd look like a fairy queen if the idiots who paint 'em realised that fairies ought to be dark, and not tow-coloured. Of course she'll refuse me a few times, but her father'll be on my side."

"Why?"

"Because he's a rather clever old scoundrel, and he'll know that I'm a succeeder—a getter."

The old woman looked thoughtful. "I haven't liked anything you told me about him, Olly. But, after all, he has paid up, and lots of good men have been unfortunate in business."

The young fellow took up his dress-coat, which was new and richly lined, and drew it on with care.

"Oh, I'm not marrying into this family because I admire my future father-in-law," he answered. "I haven't any little illusions about him, old lady. It's his wife who's done the paying, or I'm very much mistaken. She's an honest woman—poor thing."

There was such deep sympathy in his voice that his mother, who had risen, and was patting and smoothing the new coat into place on his broad shoulders, pulled him round till he faced her, and looked down at him, for she was taller than he.

"Why are you so sorry for her?"

He hesitated for a moment, and his hesitation meant much to her.

"I don't know. She never says anything, of course. She seems happy enough, but I believe—I believe she's found him out——"

"God help her," Mrs. Wick answered.

The young man remembered this episode as he sat opposite his hostess at dinner an hour and a half later. The dining-room had been re-papered since he had drunk that glass of luke-warm wine in it the day of Hermione's wedding, and his sharp eyes noticed the absence of several ugly things that had been there then. Stags no longer hooted to each other across mountain chasms over the sideboard, and one or two good line drawings hung in their place.

"How do you like it?" Griselda asked him. "Paul and I have been cheering things up a bit."

"Splendid," he replied promptly. "I say, how beautiful your sister is!"

Griselda's rather hard little face softened charmingly as she looked across the table, where the bride was sitting. Hermione Gaskell-Walker was a very handsome young woman in an almost classical way, and her short-sighted, clever-looking husband, who sat nearly opposite her, evidently thought so too, for he peered over the flowers at her in adoration that was plain and pleasing to see.

"They've such a jolly house in Campden Hill. His father was Adrian Gaskell-Walker, the landscape painter, and collected things."

Mr. Wick nodded, but did not answer, for he was busy making a series of those mental photographs, whose keenness and durability so largely contributed to his success in life. He had an amazing power of storing up records of incidents that somehow or other might come in useful to him, and this little dinner party, which he had decided to be a milestone on his road, interested him acutely in its detail.

By candlelight, in perfect evening dress, Ferdinand Walbridge's slightly dilapidated charms were very manifest. On his right sat an elderly lady about whom Mr. Wick's apparatus recorded only one word—pearls.

Next to her came Paul Walbridge, looking older than his twenty-nine years—thin, delicate, rather high shouldered, with remarkably glossy dark hair and immense soft, dove-coloured eyes. He looked far better bred,