l right. He has the `come-hither eye,' as his mother had
before him!"

"And his aunt!"

Margot chuckled complacently. "Well! it's a valuable thing to possess.
I find it most useful in my various plights. They are dear naughty
boys, both of them, and I always love them, but rather less than usual
when I see you looking so worn out. You have enough strain on you
without turning nursemaid into the bargain."

Mrs Martin sighed, and knitted her delicate brows.

"I do feel such a wicked wretch, but one of the hardest bits of life at
the present is being shut up with the boys in one room all day long.
They are very good, poor dears, but when one is racked with anxiety, it
is a strain to play wild Indians and polar bears for hours at a stretch.
We do some lessons now, and that's a help--and Jack insisted that I
should engage this girl to take them out in the afternoon. I must be a
wretched mother, for I am thankful every day afresh to hear the door
bang behind them, and to know that I am free until tea-time."

"Nonsense! Don't be artificial, Edie! You know that you are nothing of
the sort, and that it's perfectly natural to be glad of a quiet hour.
You are a marvel of patience. I should snap their heads off if I had
them all day, packed up in this little room. What have you had for
lunch? No meat? And you look so white and spent. How wicked of you!"

"Oh, Margot," sighed the other pathetically, "it's not food that I need!
What good can food do when one is racked with anxiety? It's my mind
that is ill, not my body. We can't pay our way even with the rent of
the house coming in, unless Jack gets something to do very soon, and I
am such a stupid, useless thing that I can do nothing to help."

"Except to give up your house, and your servants, and turn yourself into
nurse, and seamstress, and tailor, and dressmaker, rolled into one; and
live in an uproar all day long, and be a perfect angel of sympathy every
night--that's all!--and try to do it on bread and cheese into the
bargain! There must be something inherently mean in women, to skimp
themselves as they do. You'd never find a man who would grudge tenpence
for a chop, however hard up he might be, but a woman spends twopence on
lunch, and a sovereign on tonics! Darling, will it comfort you most if
I sympathise, or encourage? I know there are moods when it's pure
aggravation to be cheerful!"

Edith sighed and smiled at one and the same moment.

"I don't