“tame-cat” young man, as Winifred contemptuously called him, poured out the tea for his mother and her young friends.

“Yes, that’s to say she has had to put up with my feeble efforts in that direction, failing better,” he said. “Now then, I think I have got hers—my mother’s—tea just as she likes it; will you be so good as to tell me of any peculiarities of taste of yours, or your sister’s—cream, sugar, both or neither, or which?”

“Winifred takes no cream—I take both. Yes, I will hand Mrs Balderson hers, and you can look after Winifred. This is mine? Thank you,” and Celia seated herself near the tea-table.

“Did you enjoy the concert this afternoon?” young Mr Balderson inquired. “It was a concert you were at, wasn’t it?”

“Oh yes, very much, very much indeed,” said Celia. “It was a very nice concert. But the thing that we cared for most was Miss Norreys’ singing.”

“Miss Norreys—Hertha Norreys, do you mean?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Balderson, “these girls have both fallen in love with her, Eric.”

“With her as well as with her singing,” said Winifred.

Eric looked up with a comical expression.

“She is very charming, I am told,” he said. “I cannot testify to the fact from personal experience, for you can’t exactly call a person charming who deliberately snubs you.”

“How do you mean?” said his mother. “I didn’t know you had ever met Miss Norreys, and if you have, why should you think she snubbed you?”

“Because she did,” Eric replied simply.

Winifred’s eyes sparkled. Her admiration for Hertha rose still higher.

“Just what I should have expected of her,” she thought to herself.

“My dear Eric,” said his mother, with a very slight touch of annoyance in her tone, “I think you talk nonsense sometimes.”

He smiled.

“Sometimes, perhaps, but not always,” he said.

But he rose from his seat as he spoke, for he was more than quick at reading his mother’s feelings, and went towards the piano.

“I’ll look out the songs, mother, that I want to try over,” he remarked. “That’s to say, if you are still good for a little practising before dinner.”

“Certainly I am. Indeed, we hurried home partly on that account,” Mrs Balderson replied. “I will run up-stairs and take off my things in a moment. And you, dears, will have a little quiet time for your letters, and for resting, if you are tired.”

“I shall be glad to write my letters, but I am not the least tired, thank you,” said Winifred, in her clear, slightly incisive tone, almost as if resenting the kindly imputation.

“I am, rather,” said Celia gently.

“I scarcely see how you could help it, after such a busy day,” agreed Mrs Balderson. “You have been on the go since early this morning. Such a contrast from your regular restful life at home. Not that we Londoners can stand so much fatigue as country people often imagine we can, fancying that a rush is our usual existence.” She was leaving the room as she spoke, but stopped to add, “Remember I want you to be fresh this evening, though it is only a small party. Your cousin is coming, for one.”

“Oh dear,” said Winifred, in a half-complaining voice, when her hostess had gone, “I forgot about Lennox being in London just now. Mrs Balderson really need not have troubled to ask him. We have quite enough of him at home.”

Eric glanced at her.

“I fear we can scarcely put him off now, except with grave discourtesy,” he said. And Winifred could not tell if he was laughing at her or not. “Besides,” he went on, “though I cannot hope the fact would carry any weight with it, I am very fond of Lennox. I do my best to see something of him whenever I get a chance.”

“Oh yes,” said Winifred, coolly, “I know you and he are chums. Well, as long as he does not sit beside me at dinner and entertain me with questions about the cows and the pigs and the old women at home, whom I am more than thankful to forget for a week or two—”

“He shall not sit beside you at dinner; so much I can guarantee,” said Eric. And though Winifred thanked him laughingly, as if all that had been said was a joke, she did not entirely disagree with Celia’s first observation when they found themselves alone in their own room.

“Winifred,” said Celia, “I think Mr Eric Balderson was really rather angry at your tone about Lennox. I heard it in his voice, though he has that dry way of speaking that makes it difficult to know whether he is in fun or earnest.”

She was standing in front of the fire—a brightly glowing one—in the large room, which, with a dressing-room out of it, the two girls shared together. And as she spoke she turned round slowly, and looked at her sister half timidly.

“Well, and what if he were?” said Winifred. “After all, Lennox is our cousin, not his. He does not need to take up the cudgels in the poor dear’s defence. It would be very impertinent.”

“He would not mean it that way,” said Celia, “and though you are so much cleverer and wiser than I, you know, Winifred, onlookers sometimes see the most. Don’t you think, considering how things are with Lennox, it would be better always to speak very nicely of him? After all, his caring for you is no crime—you need not despise him for it.”

“Oh, bother!” said Winifred, throwing herself back into a comfortable chintz-covered arm-chair, “perhaps it would be better. But I hate beating about the bush and always thinking such a lot about what to say and not to say. I do like to be natural. However, I’ll be more careful. But I am so tired of Lennox and all that dull, humdrum country life that Mrs Balderson calls restful and delightful. And so are you, Celia; we are at one on these subjects.”

“Of course we are,” said the younger girl, “though my feeling is not that I want to leave home, but simply to have—you know what—my chance, my test, which I cannot have at home. But you are very good, dear Winifred, not to think me impertinent for warning you.”

For a moment or two there was silence.

Then said Winifred, raising herself, “I must write to mamma.”

A shadow of disappointment flitted across Celia’s face, but there was no trace of it in her voice.

“To mamma?” she said. “Oh, then, I will write to Louise.”

“Of course,” said Winifred, majestically. “It would never do for me not to write first to mamma. Indeed, I don’t see that there is any hurry for your writing at all.”

She got out her paper and pens as she spoke. Then with the queer mixture of candid self-deprecation which existed in her, side by side with unusual self-assertion, she startled Celia by an unexpected speech.

“About what you were saying of Lennox just now, Celia,” she began, her fingers toying idly with the pen she had already dipped into the ink, “do you know, at the bottom of my heart, I don’t think I believe that he does care for me?”