Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she
stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent,
ungenial guest.

The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim,
blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian
Embassy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given
up his secretaryship after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city
that he and his wife both hated.

They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both
liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died,
leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were
well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the
certainty that their children would one day be in still better
circumstances.

One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the
brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged
eighteen months.

She was a thin woman of thirty-six or seven, with large dark eyes,
somewhat hollow now, and a brown vivid face on which life had put
several deep lines--all of which, though unbeautiful in themselves, were
good lines, and made for character.

"And here's the tower in which the little boy lived," she said to the
baby, who, very fat and peculiarly blond, regarded her rapturously,
"and here's the dungeon where they put him when he was naughty. If
Thaddeus bites Elvira again," she added gravely, "what will happen to
him?"

But Thaddeus, who was possessed of the courage incidental to a sound
digestion and dormant nerves, only laughed and showed the wicked fangs
that had bitten the nurse.

It was a pleasant, bare, sunny room, the rug covered with shabby toys,
the walls nearly hidden by pictures from illustrated papers. Through an
open door one saw a table at which sat a little girl of six, bending
over a book with the unmistakable air of a child learning something
uninteresting.

"Eliza!"

"Yes, mother?" Eliza looked up. She too was blonde, but her eyes were
dark.

"Where is Pammy, dear?"

"I don't know, mother. Perhaps she's eating plaster again," suggested
Eliza, with the alertness that even charming children sometimes show
when face to face with the crime of some contemporary.

Pam did not laugh. Plaster-eating may be funny in other people's
children, but seven-year-old Pammy, her adopted daughter, was too old to
persist in the habit, and punishment seemed t