house when she marries, and probably a
pied-a-terre in the country--which makes seven. Oh yes, and Paul a
hut in Africa makes eight. I wish we could get Howards End. That was
something like a dear little house! Didn't you think so, Aunt Juley?"

"I had too much to do, dear, to look at it," said Mrs. Munt, with a
gracious dignity. "I had everything to settle and explain, and Charles
Wilcox to keep in his place besides. It isn't likely I should remember
much. I just remember having lunch in your bedroom."

"Yes, so do I. But, oh dear, dear, how dreadful it all seems! And in the
autumn there began that anti-Pauline movement--you, and Frieda, and
Meg, and Mrs. Wilcox, all obsessed with the idea that I might yet marry
Paul."

"You yet may," said Frieda despondently.

Helen shook her head. "The Great Wilcox Peril will never return. If I'm
certain of anything it's of that."

"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions."

The remark fell damply on the conversation. But Helen slipped her arm
round her cousin, somehow liking her the better for making it. It was
not an original remark, nor had Frieda appropriated it passionately, for
she had a patriotic rather than a philosophic mind. Yet it betrayed that
interest in the universal which the average Teuton possesses and the
average Englishman does not. It was, however illogically, the good,
the beautiful, the true, as opposed to the respectable, the pretty,
the adequate. It was a landscape of Bocklin's beside a landscape of
Leader's, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural
life. It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul. It may have been a bad
preparation for what followed.

"Look!" cried Aunt Juley, hurrying away from generalities over the
narrow summit of the down. "Stand where I stand, and you will see the
pony-cart coming. I see the pony-cart coming."

They stood and saw the pony-cart coming. Margaret and Tibby were
presently seen coming in it. Leaving the outskirts of Swanage, it drove
for a little through the budding lanes, and then began the ascent.

"Have you got the house?" they shouted, long before she could possibly
hear.

Helen ran down to meet her. The highroad passed over a saddle, and a
track went thence at right angles alone the ridge of the down.

"Have you got the house?"

Margaret shook her head.

"Oh, what a nuisance! So we're as we were?"

"Not exactly."

She got out, looking tired.

"Some mystery," sai