less intersecting one another among the more
distant guests, most of them, however, with the same feeling of
curiosity as to what this newly-discovered wife and daughter of Alwyn
Egremont might be like.

Externally, in her rich black silk, trimmed with point lace, and her
little straw-coloured bonnet with its tuft of feathery grass and blue
cornflower, she was so charming that her daughter danced round her,
crying, 'O mammy, mammy, if they could but see you at home'--then, at a
look: 'Well then--Aunt Ursel, and Miss Mary, and Mr. Dutton!'

Nuttie was very much pleased with her own pretty tennis dress; but she
had no personal vanity for herself, only for her mother. The knowledge
that she was no beauty was no grievance to her youthful spirits; but
when her father surveyed them in the hall, she looked for his verdict
for her mother as if their relations were reversed.

'Ha! Well, you certainly are a pretty creature, Edda,' he said
graciously. 'You'll pass muster! You want nothing but style. And,
hang it! you'll do just as well without it, if the Canoness will only
do you justice. Faces like that weren't given for nothing.'

She blushed incarnadine and accepted one of his kisses with a pleasure,
at which Nuttie wondered, her motherly affection prompting her to
murmur in his ear--

'And Ursula?'

'She'll not cut you out; but she is Egremont enough to do very fairly.
Going already?'

'If you would come with us,' she said wistfully, to the horror of
Nuttie, who was burning to be at the beginning of all the matches.

'I? oh no! I promised old Will to look in, but that won't be till late
in the day, or I shall have to go handing all the dowagers into the
dining-room to tea.'

'Then I think we had better go on. They asked us to come early, so as
to see people arrive and know who they are.'

_They_ was a useful pronoun to Alice, who felt it a liberty to call her
grand-looking sister-in-law, Jane--was too well-bred to term her Mrs.
William.

The mother and daughter crossed the gardens, Nuttie chattering all the
way about the tennis tactics she had picked up from Blanche, while her
mother answered her somewhat mechanically, wondering, as her eye fell
on the square squat gray church tower, what had become of the earnest
devotion to church work and intellectual pursuits that used to
characterise the girl. True, always both mother and daughter had
hitherto kept up their church-going, and even their Sunday-schoo