on. You do your best, I know, but she needs a
change. There is no reason why she should not see visitors. Has she no
young friends who could come to have tea with her, and make her laugh?"

Whitey sighed, and leant against the banisters with a dejected air. It
is exhausting work being cheerful for two, and no one would have
welcomed a laughing stranger more heartily than herself. The question
was,--where was she to be found?

"She was lamenting to me the other day that she had no girl-friends.
She went abroad to school, and has had little opportunity of making
acquaintances since she came home. Miss Munns is very--conservative.
She does not care to associate with her neighbours. There is a charming
girl who has come to live opposite. We watch her from the window, and
Sylvia has been trying to persuade her aunt to call for the last three
weeks; but it is useless. I'm sorry, for she looks just the very person
we want."

"Won't call, won't she? We'll see about that. I'm not going to have my
patient thrown back, after all the trouble I've had with her, for fifty
old ladies and their prejudices. You leave it to me!" cried the jovial
doctor, and tramped downstairs into the parlour to give his orders
forthwith.

A little diplomacy, a little coaxing, a few words of warning to revive
affectionate anxiety, a good big dose of flattery, and the thing was
done; and, what was better still, Aunt Margaret was left under the happy
delusion that the projected visit was the outcome of her own
inspiration. She said nothing to the invalid, but at half-past three
that afternoon she put on her woollen crossover, and a black silk
muffler, and her best silk dolman, and dear Aunt Sarah's sable pelerine,
and her Sunday bonnet, and new black kid gloves, two sizes too big,
carried her tortoiseshell card-case in one hand, and her umbrella in the
other, and sailed across the road to call at Number Three.

Sylvia had gone back to bed after lunch by her own request. The hair-
cutting ordeal had tired her out, and there was, besides, a deep-seated
wearing pain in one foot and ankle which made her long to lie still and
rest. She tried to sleep, and after long waiting had just arrived at
that happy stage when thoughts grow misty, and a gentle prickling
feeling creeps up from the toes to the brain, when a patriotic barrel-
organ began to rattle out the strains of "Rule, Britannia" from the end
of the road, and the chance was gone. Then