plenty at 4 p.m. was
appalling. Miss Lowe's convulsed apologies sent the visitors into
explosions.

"Look at the tarts!" choked Miss Barton. "They're all made with
black-currant jam! There's one apiece for us, counting the apple-pie.
And the currant-bread is half an inch thick! Who'll take a slice of
lukewarm ham? Oh, it's positively painful to laugh so hard! I never
saw such a bean-feast in my life!"

"We certainly can't consume all these!" echoed Miss Lowe. "The
children must eat up some of them for supper. It will take days to get
through such a larderful! For once they'll be satiated with jam-tarts.
Well, I suppose it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Still, if the
baby comes to an untimely end through acute dyspepsia, I shan't be in
the least surprised."

Mrs. Marsden seemed determined to entertain her guests, and had yet
another surprise in store for them. She beckoned them into a little
private parlour of her own, and showed them the paintings of her
eldest boy, a youth of eighteen, who, she proudly assured them, had
never had a drawing lesson in his life. It was not difficult to
believe her, for the specimens were so funny that the spectators could
hardly keep their faces straight. Horses with about as much shape as
those in a child's Noah's ark, figures resembling Dutch dolls in
rigidity, flowers daubed on with the crudest colours, and the final
effort, a bird's-eye view of the village, consisting chiefly of tiled
roofs and chimney-pots in lurid red and black.

"No doubt it has afforded him the supremest delight," whispered Miss
Lowe to Miss Barton, "and it's evidently a subject of the utmost
satisfaction to his mother, so I won't make carping criticisms, but
take it as a moral for the necessity of due humility over one's own
productions. Perhaps mine would be as diverting to an Academician as
his are to me."

In the same room Mrs. Marsden showed her visitors a mysterious
oil-painting, black with age and hideous beyond compare, which she
informed them was an original portrait of Nell Gwynn. She supposed it
to be immensely valuable, and was keeping it safe until prices rose a
little higher still, after the war, when she had hopes of launching it
on the auction rooms in London, and realizing a sum that would make
her family's fortune.

"An ambition she'll never realize in this wide world," said Miss
Barton afterwards, "for the thing is absolutely not genuine. It's not
the right period for Nell Gwynn,