led faintly at
the absurd appearance of the Venus in her mackintosh, but he was
evidently depressed. He looked mournfully at the tea-table.

"I'm afraid the tea's poison, Ted, and it's cold."

"It doesn't matter, I don't want any."

"Had tea at Audrey's?"

"No."

He strode impatiently to the table and took up one of the illustrations
Katherine had been working at.

"What's up?" said she.

"Oh--er--for one thing, I've heard from the editor of the 'Sunday
Illustrated.' He's in a beastly bad temper, and says my last batch of
illustrations isn't funny enough. The old duffer's bringing out a
religious serial, and he must have humour to make it go down."

Katherine was relieved. To divert him, she told him the family's opinion
as to his relations with Audrey. That raised his spirits so far that he
called his uncle a "fantastic old gander," and his cousin Nettie an
"evil-minded little beast."

"After all, Ted," said Katherine, judicially, "why does Audrey go on
making a mystery of your engagement?"

"I don't know and I don't care," said Ted, savagely.

Surely it was not in the power of that harmless person, the editor of
the "Sunday Illustrated," to move him so? Something must have happened.

What had happened was this. As Ted was going into the little brown house
at Chelsea he had met Mr. Langley Wyndham coming out of it; and for the
first time in his life he had found Audrey in a bad temper. She was
annoyed, in the first place, because the novelist had been unable to
stay to tea. She had provided a chocolate cake on purpose, the eminent
man having once approved of that delicacy. (It was a pretty way Audrey
had, this remembering the likings of her friends.) She was also annoyed
because Ted's coming had followed so immediately on Wyndham's going. It
was her habit now, whenever she had seen Wyndham, to pass from the
reality of his presence into a reverie which revived the sense of it,
and Ted's arrival had interfered with this pastime. The first thing the
boy did, too, was to wound her tenderest susceptibilities. He began
playing with the books that lay beside her.

"What a literary cat it is!"

She frowned and drew in her breath quickly, as if in pain. He went on
turning over the pages--it was Wyndham's "London Legends"--with
irreverent fingers.

"I should very much like to know----" said Audrey to Ted, and stopped
short.

"What would you very much like to know, Puss?"

"What you saw in me, to begin with