re not drawn as tightly as in the former years?"

"If it was so, it was only natural," said the old lady. "However, if
you ask Carnaby, and if the picture has no great value, I am sure he
will wish you to have it, especially if you know it to have been your
mother's property." Here Carnaby sauntered into the room. "That's all
right, grandmother," he said, "I heard what you were saying; only I
wish it was a real Sir Joshua we were giving Cousin Robin instead of a
copy!"

"Thank you, Carnaby dear, and thank you, too, Aunt de Tracy. You can't
think how much it is to me to have this; it is a precious link between
mother's girlhood, and mother, and me." So saying, she dropped a timid
kiss upon Mrs. de Tracy's iron-grey hair, and left the room.

"If she could live in England long enough to get over that excessive
freedom of manner, your cousin would be quite a pleasing person, but I
am afraid it goes too deep to be cured," Mrs. de Tracy remarked as she
smoothed the hairs that might have been ruffled by Robinette's kiss.

Carnaby made no reply. He was looking out into the garden and feeling
half a boy, half a man, but wholly, though not very contentedly, a
kinsman.

XI

THE SANDS AT WESTON

"Thursday morning? Is it possible that this is Thursday morning? And I
must run up to London on Saturday," said Lavendar to himself as he
finished dressing by the open window. He looked up the day of the week
in his calendar first, in order to make quite sure of the fact. Yes,
there was no doubt at all that it was Thursday. His sense of time must
have suffered some strange confusion; in one way it seemed only an
hour ago that he had arrived from the clangour and darkness of London
to the silence of the country, the cuckoos calling across the river
between the wooded hills, and the April sunshine on the orchard trees;
in another, years might have passed since the moment when he first saw
Robinette Loring sitting under Mrs. Prettyman's plum tree.

"Eight days have we spent together in this house, and yet since that
time when we first crossed in the boat, I've never been more than half
an hour alone with her," he thought. "There are only three other
people in the house after all, but they seem to have the power of
multiplying themselves like the loaves and fishes (only when they're
not wanted) so that we're eternally in a crowd. That boy particularly!
I like Carnaby, if he could get it into his thick head that his
presence is