r seventeen-and-six!

"I'm beginning to doubt," repeated Mollie solemnly, "whether it is half
so amusing to be rich as it is to be poor. When you can get everything
you want the moment you want it, you don't appreciate it half so much as
when you have pined for it, and saved up your pennies for it, for months
beforehand. When we get a new thing at home, the whole family pay
visits to it like a shrine, and we open the door and go into the room
where it is, one after the other, to study the effect, and gloat over
it. It _is_ fun; isn't it, now? Confess that it is!"

"Ye-es," agreed Mrs Thornton doubtfully. "But where you have to wait
too long, the sense of humour gets a little bit blunted, especially as
one grows older, Mollie dear!"

She sighed as she spoke, and her eyes roved pensively round the
discoloured walls, those same walls whose condition had fired Mollie to
make her unsuccessful appeal. The girl's thoughts went back to that
embarrassing interview, not altogether regretfully, since it had ended
in bringing about a better understanding between her uncle and herself.
Perhaps, though he had refused her request, it would linger in his mind,
and lead to good results. Nothing but the unexpected was certain about
Uncle Bernard.

The next afternoon the vicarage drawing-room presented a rather chaotic
appearance, as Mrs Thornton and her assistants prepared the important
couches. Ruth sat in the middle of the floor running up lengths of
brightly coloured muslins on a sewing-machine, while the other two
wrestled with the difficulties which attend all make-shifts. With the
greatest regard for ease and luxury, the beds were pronounced decidedly
too low to look genuine, and the rickety legs had to be propped up with
foundations manufactured out of old bound volumes of magazines, bricks
from the garden, and an odd weight or two from the kitchen scales. The
sofa-blankets also turned out to be too narrow, and persisted in
disclosing the iron legs, until, in desperation, one end was sewn to the
mattress, allowing the full width to hang down in front.

At last the work was finished, and the hot and dishevelled workers
retired to the hall, and, re-entering the room to study the effect, in
true Farrell manner, pronounced the "divans" to look professional beyond
all fear of detection.

The next achievement was to place a tapering bank of plants against a
discoloured patch of wallpaper, and many and varied were the str