r composure
before joining her sisters in the garden. The worst of belonging to a
large family, however, is that it is exceedingly difficult to secure
privacy, and, as fate would have it, who should be seated in the porch
room but Nan herself, the very last member of the household whom Lilias
would have wished to meet in the circumstances. Her flushed face and
tearful eyes could not escape attention, but while Maud would have been
tactfully silent, Elsie sympathetic, Agatha gushing, and Christabel
apparently unconscious, Nan must needs stare with all her eyes, whistle
like a schoolboy, and exclaim inelegantly--

"Halloa! What's up? What in the world are you in a rage about now?"

"Now," indeed! As if she were in the habit of flying into rages every
ten minutes of the day! As if it were not universally acknowledged that
she had the sweetest temper in the family! Lilias felt more irritated
than ever, and would have enjoyed nothing so much as taking the big
blundering creature by the shoulders and giving her a good shaking. She
controlled herself, however, and answered with a gallant attempt at
pathos--

"Rage is hardly the word, Nan. I am very, very miserable. You don't
understand, and I am not at liberty to explain the reason. I am in
trouble--horrible trouble!"

"Humph!" quoth Nan sceptically. "Doesn't seem to have a chastening
effect upon you. It affects us all differently, I suppose. I should
have said you were in a savage rage, if you'd asked me!"

"But I didn't ask you, you see, and it is very wrong of you to judge.
If I could tell you the truth, you would realise your mistake, but I
must keep my own counsel."

"Of course, of course! Don't tell me, I beseech you; I can't keep a
secret if I'm paid for it," said Nan calmly, and with an absence of
curiosity altogether maddening to the listener. There was nothing
Lilias wanted more than to be coaxed to tell her trouble and pose as a
suffering martyr, for her sister's benefit. She flounced out of the
room in high dudgeon, and Nan stopped her work and looked after her with
thoughtful eyes.

"This is the beginning," she said tragically to herself--"the beginning
of the end!"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

NED IN TROUBLE.

When Ned Talbot arrived a fortnight later, his face showed that his
anxiety had been no imaginary thing. He looked, indeed, so worn and
aged, that his friends were shocked to see him, and tears of
commiseration rose in Lilias's pr