ely troubled at what
he had to say, he came up into their little sitting-room, he found it
bright with flowers; the fragrance of sweet peas filled the air. Anna,
who had longed for flowers all her life and had welcomed with tremulous
gratitude the rare opportunities that had come in her way of receiving
any, had suddenly realised that it might not be sinful to buy them. The
joy that she had in the handful bought from a street vendor was cheap,
after all, at the price that might have seemed exorbitant if it had been
spent on the flowers alone.

"Robert," said Jane, almost before he was inside the room, "guess what
we are going to do?"

"Something very naughty, I'm afraid," Anna said, excited and shy at the
same time. She was generally less able than Jane to overcome the awe
that they both felt of a relation so great and so beneficent, so
altogether perfect, as their brother Robert, but at this moment she was
intoxicated by the possession of wealth, by the sense of luxury, of
well-being, by that fragrance of the spirit her imagination added to the
fragrance of the flowers that stood near her. "We're each going to buy a
fur cloak like that, look!" And she held out to him proudly the picture
in the inside cover of the _Realm of Fashion_, representing a tall,
slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well have
been imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which the
lining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we have
said, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did not
ridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point of
view was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this evening
he had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access of
emotion. There was a plain and obvious pathos in this particular
situation that it needed no very fine sensibilities to grasp, in the
sight of his sister, her small, thickset little figure encased in her
ugly little gown, looking up appealingly to him over her spectacles with
the joy of a child in the toy she was going to buy. It was probably the
first, the very first time in her life, that she had had that particular
experience. Added to the joy of getting the thing she coveted was the
sense of having looked a conscientious scruple in the face, and seen it
fly before her like an evil spirit before a spell. She had routed the
enemy, pushed aside the obstacle in front of her, and, excited,