pride
to see you calling at Galvaston House in that old serge dress. He is
not really improvident, Livy. You have enough in hand for present
necessities, and there will be something coming in next month."

"Oh, dear, yes; and do you know, Aunt Madge, they have sent for Marcus
to attend the lodger at number seventeen. He is a music-teacher and
very respectable, and can afford to pay his doctor, so that is swallow
number three."

"Then I am sure you can wear your new dress with an easy conscience,"
and then Olivia's last scruples vanished.

Olivia looked so distinguished in her grey tweed that Marcus made her
blush by telling her that she had never looked so handsome.

Mr. Gaythorne gave her an odd penetrating glance when she entered the
library.

"I hardly knew you, Mrs. Luttrell," he said, dryly, and then his manner
changed and softened. "That was her favourite colour," he said.
"Olive was always a grey bird; she liked soft, subdued tints; she was a
bit of a Puritan. I often told her so."

"I am glad you like my new dress," returned Olivia, simply. "My
husband chose it for me, he has such good taste."

"You need not tell me that, Mrs. Luttrell." And again Olivia blushed
like a girl at the implied compliment.

Mr. Gaythorne was looking over a portfolio of water-colour paintings.
Olivia had not yet seen them, and she was full of outspoken admiration,
as Mr. Gaythorne placed one after another before her.

"They are all the work of a young artist who died at Rome," he said.
"I bought them of his widow. They are very well done; he had great
promise, poor fellow. If he had lived, he would have done good work.
These were merely pot-boilers, as he called them--little things he
painted on the spur of the moment."

"To me they are perfectly beautiful," returned Olivia. "Those two are
so lovely that I could not choose between them. Please let me look at
them a little longer, Mr. Gaythorne, I want to tell Aunt Madge about
them." And Olivia, who was always charmingly natural in her movements,
propped her chin on her hands, and looked long and earnestly at the
pictures.

Their beauty lay in the soft rich colouring and a certain
suggestiveness in the subject.

One was a little grey church on a hill-side; the church was ruinous and
out of repair, the churchyard full of weeds and thistles; a storm had
just broken, and an old shepherd in a ragged smock had taken refuge in
the porch, his rough-looking dog at hi