pleased enough with the idea
of the change, once he had ascertained his guinea-pigs might accompany
him, and was still more pleased when he was told he would at all
events for a time have no lessons to do.

"You'll have plenty to learn though," Aymer had remarked drily when he
made the announcement. Christopher refrained from asking for an
explanation with difficulty.

Towards the middle of October Nevil Aston, just in the midst of a
period of blissful laziness, sauntered down the long walks of the
south garden in Renata's wake, occasionally stopping to pick up one or
other of the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother,
interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was
engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a
tortoise-shell kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and
dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like
trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative
invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border
to border choosing her flowers with care, and looking even smaller
than she was in the proximity of her lanky husband, and the plump
little babies toddling after.

Presently she came to a stop. All her satellites stopped too. She
regarded her trophies critically.

"This is very good for the end of October, you know." She remarked to
all the assembled court. "I only want some violets now. Nevil, I wish
you'd stop Charlotte picking the heads off the fuchsias: there are no
more to come out."

Nevil hoisted his small daughter on his shoulder as the safest way to
avoid an altercation and humbly asked if he must pick violets, "they
grow so low down."

"You grow so far up," she retorted scornfully. "Max can help me. You
can watch with Charlotte. You are very good at watching people work."

"It is not a common virtue," pleaded Nevil, "watchers generally tell
the workers how to do it. I never do. Why don't you tell a gardener to
pick them, Renata?"

"A gardener! For Aymer?"

"All this trouble for Aymer?"

"It is a pleasure."

"I know just how it will be," he complained mournfully, "the moment
Aymer is here you will hound me off to work and I shall see nothing of
you at all. You won't even give me new pens. Charlotte, I should look
horrid if I had no hair: be merciful."

Renata smiled and shook her head. "I shall get no more work out of you
this side of Christmas, sir. I have no such imposs