se,--most girls feel the same, and Leo was a very girl, and youthful
instincts were warm within her.

Sue, however, had received her orders on the point, and though they were
distasteful, she recognised in them an element of reasonableness.

"I am sorry, dear, but that would never do. You know what father's
wishes are. That you should be given a dignified position in the family;
and--and I think he explained why. He had thought the matter carefully
out before he fixed on this room for you. He does not like to be argued
with, Leo."

Leo resigned herself. She knew the tone of old, it conveyed, "I am
sorry, but I shall be firm"--it was the formal, precise, elder sister,
the general's mouthpiece, not the good, old, motherly Sue, who spoke.
Further resistance would be useless.

And now, alone, sitting on the great square sofa, with great square
chairs and massive receptacles on every side, the forlorn little figure
gazed about her with a heart that sank lower and lower. She was to
occupy a "dignified position in the family"? Did that mean that she was
still to be treated ceremoniously as in Godfrey's life-time? That she
was still to have that uneasy sense of being _company_ which had then
haunted her? Sue alone had led the way to her new abode--Maud and Sybil
having vanished elsewhere--and this in itself forboded ill. She sat
motionless, pondering.

In childhood the gap between herself and her elders had always been too
wide to be bridged even at its nearest point, which was Sybil--but she
had looked to her marriage hopefully. Then somehow, she could never
quite tell how, but although she could manage to play the hostess to her
sisters on apparently equal terms at Deeside, the old position remained
intact at Boldero Abbey. For all her gay outward bearing, Leo was of a
sensitive nature, and the girls--to herself she always called them "the
girls"--had only to take a matter for granted, for her to follow their
lead.

So that while it would have been joy untold to perceive the barriers
withdrawn, and to have been allowed to run in and out of Maud's room
and Sybil's room--she did not covet Sue's--in dressing-gown and
slippers, to have brushed her hair of nights along with them and talked
the talk that goes with that time-honoured procedure, Mrs. Godfrey
Stubbs had no more been accorded this privilege, for which she had
hungered ever since she could remember, than the little out-cast Leonore
had been. Indeed, she was kept