e quick. Wait half a sec, though! There goes Dr.
Linton with Kenneth. I don't want to walk out under his wing!"

The tall dark figure of the music master was striding through the
doorway, carrying his small son, who hugged his toy with one arm, and
waved a friendly good-by with the other.

"What possessed you to drop all your music, child?" said Quenrede,
rather patronizingly to Ingred. She was still trying to live up to the
plum-colored hat. "You played ever so decently afterwards, though--you
did, really! Don't tell me again that you're nervous, for it's all
rubbish. You looked as if you enjoyed it."

"Enjoyed it!" echoed Ingred. "If you'd gone through the palpitations
that I felt this afternoon you'd want to go to a specialist, and consult
him for heart trouble! I've lived through it this once, but if I'm ever
asked to play again in public, you'd better go to the cemetery
beforehand, and choose a picturesque corner for my grave, and buy a
weeping willow ready to plant upon it. Yes, and order a headstone too,
with the simple words: 'Died of fright.' I mean it! 'Enjoyed it!'
indeed! Why, I've never in the whole of my life been in such an
absolutely blue funk!"

CHAPTER XIII

Quenrede Comes Out

The Saxon family celebrated Christmas at the bungalow with mixed
feelings. As Ingred said, it was like the curate's egg--parts of it were
very nice. It was the first Christmas they had spent all together for
many years, and if they could only have forgotten Rotherwood, and their
altered circumstances, they would have enjoyed it immensely. Mrs. Saxon,
the unfailing sunshine-radiator of the household, tried to ignore the
tone of discontent in her husband's voice, the grumpy attitude of
Egbert, Quenrede's fit of the blues, and Athelstane's rather martyred
pose. She insisted on bundling everybody out for a blow on the moors.

"If we'd been living in Grovebury," she remarked, "we should probably
have taken a jaunt to Wynch-on-the-Wold as a special treat. Let us think
ourselves lucky in being on the spot and only having to turn out of our
own door to be at once in such lovely scenery. It's like having a
country holiday at Christmas instead of midsummer--a thing I always
hankered after and never got before!"

Certainly winter on the wold held a charm of its own. The great waste of
brown moor stretching under the gray sky showed rich patches where
yellow grass and rushes edged dark boggy pools, the low-growing stems of