life, to take up the dull, everyday routine existence at Old Place where,
what with a bad investment, high prices, and the sudden leap in the
income-tax, from living pleasantly at ease they had become most
unpleasantly poor.

Jack, who came next to Betty, though a long way after, and who had just
missed being in the war, was a very different type of young Englishman
from what George had been. He was clever, self-assertive, and already
known as a brilliant debater and as a sound speaker at the Oxford Union.
There need be no trouble as to Jack Tosswill's future--he was going to
the Bar, and there was little doubt that he would succeed there. One of
his idiosyncrasies was his almost contemptuous indifference to women. He
was fond of his sisters in a patronising way, but the average pleasant
girl, of whom the neighbourhood of Beechfield had more than its full
share, left him quite cold.

The next in age--Dolly--was the most commonplace member of the family.
Her character seemed to be set on absolutely conventional lines, and the
whole family, with the exception of her father, who did not concern
himself with such mundane things, secretly hoped that she would marry a
young parson who had lately "made friends with her." As is often the case
with that type of young woman, Dolly was feckless about money, and would
always have appeared badly and unsuitably dressed but for the efforts of
her elder sister and step-mother.

Rosamund, the youngest and by far the prettiest of the three sisters, was
something of a problem. Though two years younger than Dolly, she had
already had three or four love affairs, and when only sixteen, had been
the heroine of a painful scrape--the sort of scrape which the people
closely concerned try determinedly to forget, but which everyone about
them remembers to his or her dying day.

The hero of that sorry escapade had been a man of forty, separated from
his wife. On the principle that "truth will out even in an affidavit,"
poor Rosamund's little world was well aware that the girl, or rather the
child, had been simply vain and imprudent. But still, she had disappeared
for two terrible long days and nights, and even now, when anything
recalled the episode to her step-mother or to Betty, they would shudder
with an awful inward tremor, recollecting what they had both gone
through. That she had come back as silly and innocent a girl as she had
left, and feeling as much shame as she was capable of feeli