Miss Lucy looked at him. There was a big photograph of Mavis on the table at his elbow. Mavis was her own niece-Mavis Grey. It was a new photograph, one that she had never seen before, and she was ashamed to see it now. It looked like one of those shameless pictures sent in for beauty competitions, only instead of being an enlarged snapshot as most of them were, it was beautifully posed, beautifully taken-Mavis in what she supposed was some sort of fancy dress-tights, and a sort of feather frill, and a bodice cut so low that it wasn’t really a bodice at all. A dull, ugly red came into her face.

Ross Craddock laughed.

“Good photograph, isn’t it?” he said.

“Did Mavis give it to you?”

“Had it taken for me, Lucy.”

“It’s a scandalous picture!” said Lucy Craddock. “She’s my niece-she’s my own niece. And she’s your cousin too, because my father and mother were cousins. And you ought to leave her alone-you know you ought. Why, what would anyone think who saw that picture?”

“That Mavis has a very good figure,” said Ross Craddock. He fixed those dark eyes of his upon the photograph, and Miss Lucy’s colour deepened.

“I asked you to leave her alone! I begged and prayed you to before Mary got so ill.”

He said, “Exactly,” and turned his eyes upon the letter, which she still held clasped in her hand.

“And that’s why you’re turning me out?”

“My dear Lucy-what penetration!”

She went back a step. Her colour faded.

“How wicked!” she said.

Ross Craddock got up. He took her lightly by the arm and led her to the door.

“Old maid cousins should be seen and not heard,” he said, and put her out.

Chapter II

She was still there on the landing when Peter Renshaw came running up the stairs about five minutes later. He was a tall young man-all the Craddock men ran to height-but he had none of his cousin’s claim to good looks. Rather jutting brows, rather prominent cheek bones, rather wide-set eyes, a skin tanned by the Indian sun, a small nondescript moustache, hair that had once been very fair and had never quite made up its mind to go brown-that was Peter Renshaw. He was thirty years of age, held His Majesty’s commission in the Westshire Regiment, and was at present on leave from India.