gripped her hand, and went out to his two-seater, his mind still full
of his friend's strange little son.

Then all at once--he could not have told you why--Dr. O'Farrell's mind
switched off to something very different, and he went back into the hall
again.

"A word more with ye, Mrs. Tosswill. What sort of a lady has taken The
Trellis House, eh? We don't even know her name."

"She's a Mrs. Crofton--oddly enough, a friend or acquaintance of Godfrey
Radmore. He seems to have first met her during the war, when he was
quartered in Egypt. She wrote to John and asked if there was a house to
let in Beechfield, quoting Godfrey as having told her it was a delightful
village."

"And how old may she be?"

"Her husband was a Colonel Crofton, so I suppose she's middle-aged. She's
only been a widow three months--if as long."

Janet Tosswill waited till Dr. O'Farrell was well away, and then she
began walking down the broad corridor which divided Old Place. It was
such a delightful, dignified, spacious house, and very dear to them all,
yet Janet was always debating within herself whether they ought to go on
living in it, now that they had become so poor.

When she came to the last door on the left, close to the baize door
Which shut off the commons from the living rooms, she waited a moment.
Then, turning the handle, she walked into what was still called the
schoolroom, though Timmy never did his lessons there.

Betty Tosswill, the eldest of John Tosswill's three daughters, was
sitting at a big mid-Victorian writing-table, examining the house-books.
She had just discovered two "mistakes" in the milkman's account, and she
felt perhaps unreasonably sorry and annoyed. Betty had a generous,
unsuspicious outlook on human nature, and a meeting with petty dishonesty
was always a surprise. She looked up with a very friendly, welcoming
smile as her step-mother came into the room. They were very good friends,
these two, and they had a curiously close bond in Timmy, the only child
of the one and the half-brother of the other. Betty was now twenty-eight
and there were only two persons in the world whom she had loved in her
life as well as she now loved her little brother.

As her step-mother came close up to her--"Janet? What's the matter?"
she exclaimed, and as the other made no answer, a look of fear came
over the girl's face. She got up from her chair. "Don't look like that,
Janet,--you're frightening me!"

The older woman tried t