The neighbours will talk." "Oh, no,--not with a chaperon.

Besides nobody minds anything odd nowadays." Cynthia meanwhile as she lay stretched in a deep arm-chair, playing with the tea-spoon in her shapely fingers, was a pleasant vision.

Since coming in from the village, she had changed her tweed coat and skirt for a tea-frock of some soft silky stuff, hyacinth blue in colour; and Georgina, for whom tea-frocks were a silly abomination, and who was herself sitting bolt upright in a shabby blue serge some five springs old, could not deny the delicate beauty of her sister's still fresh complexion and pale gold hair, nor the effectiveness of the blue dress in combination with them.

She did not really want Cynthia to look older, nor to see her ill-dressed; but all the same there were many days when Cynthia's mature perfections roused a secret irritation in her sister--a kind of secret triumph also in the thought that, in the end, Time would be the master even of Cynthia.

Perhaps after all she would marry.