rd about him; you're the innovator of the family, Letty,
so it's no use trying to score off me. Isn't Tony up in London to-night?"

"I believe he is."

"Then I'll tell you what he's doing at this moment," cried Horace, with
egregious confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. "It's after
eleven; he's in the act of struggling out of some theatre, where the
atmosphere's so good for asthma!" Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It
was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when
Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means
blind to his many and obvious failings; but they interested her more than
the equally obvious virtues of her other brothers, whose unmeasured
objurgations drove her to the opposite extreme in special pleading. She
tried to believe that there was more in her younger brother than in any of
them, and would often speak up for him as though she had succeeded. It
may have been merely a woman's weakness for the weak, but Lettice had
taught herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of all his people she was
the only one who could have followed his vagaries of that night without
thinking the worse of him.

But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have gone
indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily at that
moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared with some
asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her; otherwise it
was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk about till all
hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair before him
through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck and a
smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling days were
over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a woman at her
worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her brother, but of
other clay.

That young man smoked a last cigarette in his father's library, and
unhesitatingly admitted the subject of dissension and dissent upon the
terrace.

"I said he wasn't doing much good there," he added, "and I don't think he
is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does."

"Do you mean that he's doing any harm?" asked Mr. Upton plainly.

"Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I--I sometimes
wish there was more!"

"More manhood, I suppose you'd call it?"

Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness.

"More