He had been a frequenter of the Farrells since the days when the old aunt was still in command, and Cicely was a young thing going to her first dances.

He and she had sparred and quarrelled as boy and girl.

Now that, after a long interval, they had again been thrown into close contact, they sparred and quarrelled still.

He was a man of high and rather stern ideals, which had perhaps been intensified--made a little grimmer and fiercer than before--by the strain of the war; and the selfish frivolity of certain persons and classes in face of the national ordeal was not the least atoned for in his eyes by the heroism of others.

The endless dress advertisements in the daily papers affected him as they might have affected the prophet Ezekiel, had the daughters of Judah added the purchase of fur coats, priced from twenty guineas to two hundred to their other enormities.