ing myself so good and economical to use it up!
Beeswax and macaroni! Oh--oh--I'll never forget it while I live!"

"It's a very pretty nose you've got, dear, but it's not much use to you,
I'm afraid," said Jack teasingly. "Did it never occur to you one moment
that it was rather highly scented, and the scent a little different from
the ordinary common or garden cheese?" and Bridgie shook her head in
solemn denial.

"Never the ghost of a suspicion! It shows how easily our senses are
deceived when we get a fixed idea in our heads; but indeed you were not
much cleverer yourselves. Every man of you had something to say about
the smell, but not a hint of what it was!"

"I thought it was rather spring-cleaningey," Sylvia said mischievously.
"Never mind, Bridgie dear--it has been a great success. I do feel so
much at home--more so than I should have done after a dozen formal
dinners where everything went right. I shall always remember it too,
and how Mr Miles declared it was nice!"

"Don't call him `Mr,' please! He is only seventeen, though he _is_ the
champion eater of the world. I wonder what exactly is the effect of
beeswax taken internally! You must tell us all about it, Miles, if you
live to the morning!"

"How pleased Pixie will be!" murmured Bridgie reflectively, leaving her
hearers to decide whether she referred to Miles's problematical disease
or the latest culinary disaster, and once again Sylvia admired the happy
faculty of seizing on the humorous side of a misfortune which seemed to
be possessed so universally by the O'Shaughnessy family.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

A HAPPY INSPIRATION.

Mrs Geoffrey Hilliard stood in the long gallery of Knock Castle and
drummed wearily on the window-pane with a white, heavily-ringed hand.
It had rained for a whole week without stopping, and for the happiest
girl in the world, as she proclaimed herself to be at least three times
a day, she came perilously near feeling shedding tears of depression.

Geoffrey was out shooting, and the old Castle seemed full of ghosts--
ghosts of the living, not of the dead--of those dear, gay, loving,
teasing, happy-go-lucky brothers and sisters who had filled the rooms
with echoes of song and laughter. Geoffrey was the dearest of husbands,
but he had one great, insuperable failing--he was not Irish, and one
phase of his wife's character was even yet an inexplicable riddle in his
eyes. Why should she consider it monotonous to have her me