eally doesn't matter
to me.... Don't you agree with me, Mrs. Lessways?" His glance was a
homage.

"Oh, you!" exclaimed Mrs. Lessways, smiling happily. "You've only got to
open your mouth, and you'd talk anybody into the middle of next week."

"Mother!" Hilda mildly reproved. She was convinced now that Mr. Cannon
had come on purpose to clinch the affair.

He laughed appreciatively.

"But really! Seriously!" he insisted.

And Mrs. Lessways, straightening her face, said, with slight
self-consciousness: "Oh, _I_ think it's worth while considering!"

"There you are!" cried Mr. Cannon to Miss Gailey.

"I shall be all alone up there!" said Miss Gailey, as cheerfully as she
could.

"I'll go up with you and see you into the place. I should have to come
back the same night--I'm so tremendously busy just now--what with the
paper and so on."

"Yes, but--I quite admit all you say, George--but--"

"Here's another idea," he broke out. "Why don't you ask Mrs. Lessways to
go up with you and stay a week or two? It would be a rare change for
her, and company for you."

Miss Gailey looked quickly at her old friend.

"Oh! Bless you!" said Mrs. Lessways. "I've only been to London once, and
that was only for two days--before Hilda was born. I should be no use in
London, at my time of life. I'm one of your home-stayers." Nevertheless
it was plain that the notion appealed to her fancy, and that she would
enjoy flirting with it.

"Nonsense, Mrs. Lessways!" said George Cannon. "It would do you a world
of good, and it would make all the difference to Sally."

"That it would!" Sarah agreed, still questioning Caroline with her
watery, appealing eyes. In Caroline, Sarah saw her salvation, and
snatched at it. Caroline could no nothing well; she had no excellence;
all that Caroline could do Sarah could do better. And yet Caroline, by
the mysterious virtue of her dry and yet genial shrewdness, and of the
unstable but reliable equilibrium of her temperament, was the skilled
Sarah's superior. They both knew it and felt it. The lofty Hilda
admitted it. Caroline herself negligently admitted it by a peculiar,
brusque, unaffected geniality of condescension towards Sarah.

"Do go, mother!" said Hilda. To herself she had been saying: "Another of
his wonderful ideas!" The prospect of being alone in the house with
Florrie, of being free for a space to live her own life untrammelled and
throw all her ardour into her work, was inexpressibly attra