--and duties
multiplied about her and hemmed her in. Mrs. Rainham was clever; the net
closed round the girl so gradually that she scarcely realized its meshes
until they were drawn tightly. Even Bob helped. "You're awfully young
to start work on your own account," he wrote. "Can't you stick it for
a bit, if they are decent to you?" And, rather than cause him any extra
worry, Cecilia decided that she must "stick it."

Of her father she saw little. He was, just as she remembered him in her
far-back childhood at Twickenham, vague and colourless. Rather to her
horror, she found that the ordeal of being kissed by his large and
scrubby moustache was just as unpleasant as ever. Cecilia had no idea
of how he earned his living--he ate his breakfast hurriedly, concealed
behind the Daily Mail, and then disappeared, bound for some mysterious
place in the city--the part of London that was always full of mystery to
Cecilia. Golf was the one thing that roused him to any enthusiasm, and
golf was even more of a mystery than the city. Cecilia knew that it
was played with assorted weapons, kept in a bag, and used for smiting
a small ball over great expanses of country, but beyond these facts her
knowledge stopped. Mrs. Rainham had set her to clean the clubs one day,
but her father, appearing unexpectedly, had taken them from her hands
with something like roughness. "No, by Jove!" he said. "You do a good
many odd jobs in this house, but I'm hanged if you shall clean my golf
sticks." Cecilia did not realize that the assumed roughness covered
something very like shame.

Money matters were rather confusing. A lawyer--also in the city--paid
her a small sum quarterly--enough to dress on, and for minor expenses.
Bob wrote that Aunt Margaret's affairs were in a beastly tangle. An
annuity had died with her, and many of her investments had been hit by
the war, and had ceased to pay dividends--had even, it seemed, ceased to
be valuable at all. There was a small allowance for Bob also, and some
day, if luck should turn, there might be a little more. Bob did not say
that his own allowance was being hoarded for Cecilia, in case he "went
west." He lived on his pay, and even managed to save something out of
that, being a youth of simple tastes. His battalion had been practically
wiped out of existence in the third year of the war, and after a
peaceful month in a north country hospital, near an aerodrome, the call
of the air was too much for him--he join