person without one is courting
trouble. Besides, I still had that impression of _something wrong_. I
had no definite suspicion; but why had the Scarletts, poor as they were,
determined to stick to the house? However, I could no more have stopped
Terry Burns when he got going than I could have stopped a torrent by
throwing in rose-petals. Which shows how he had changed. The worry a few
days ago would have been to get him going!

As Lady Scarlett listened she knitted, with strong, predatory hands.
Language, they say, is used to conceal thought. So, it occurred to me,
is knitting. I felt, watching her as a wise mouse should watch a cat,
that she was making up her mind to some action more beneficial to
herself than Terry. But for my life I couldn't guess what. She seemed to
weave a knitted screen between my mind and hers!

In the end, however, she announced that for two hundred pounds a week
her family could--to all intents and purposes--blot itself temporarily
out of existence, in the suite of the garden court. The American lady
might believe them to be poor relations of Captain Burns, or even
servants, for all she cared! Having arrived at this conclusion, she
proposed fetching her husband, that an agreement of an informal kind
might be drawn up. Again she vanished; and when Lord Scarlett appeared,
it was alone.

There were a number of ancestral portraits hanging on the walls of the
great hall: fox-faced men, most of them, with a prevailing, sharp-nosed,
slant-eyed type; and "Bertie" Scarlett was no exception to the rule. As
he came deliberately down the stairway which his wife had descended, I
remembered a scandal of his youth that Grandmother had sketched. He'd
been in a crack regiment once, and though desperately poor had tried to
live as a smart man about town. At some country-house party he'd been
accused of cheating at baccarat. The story was hushed up, but he had
left the army; and people--particularly royalties--had looked down their
noses at him ever since. His tweeds were shabby now, and he was growing
middle-aged and bald; all the same he had the air of the leading man in
a _cause celebre_. I hadn't liked his wife, and I liked him as little!

He made the same point as hers: that the agreement might be terminated
by him (_not_ by the tenant) with a fortnight's notice, given at any
time after the first month. This was a queer proviso, as queer as the
family resolve to remain on the spot. And it seemed to me tha