“You mean you are from Pethertons the publishers? Jenny wrote to them?”

He laughed.

“I seem to be betraying a confidence! But she isn’t very old, is she?”

Rosamond said,

“Jenny is twelve-and she should have told me. I am just wondering where we can talk. You see, most of the house isn’t used-it will all be dreadfully cold. My aunt has her rooms, and Jenny and I have a sitting-room, but I would rather talk to you first, if you wouldn’t mind it’s being not at all warm.”

He was so much intrigued that he would have accepted an invitation to the arctic circle. Certainly he would have done a good deal more than follow her across the glimmering hall to a door which opened under the sweep of the stair.

As she switched on a single overhead light, the room sprang into view, small, with panelled walls whose ivory tint had deepened with age almost to the color of café-au-lait. There were cracks in the paint, and there were worn places in the pale flowered carpet. That was the first effect that struck him, the cool pallor of the room-brocaded curtains and coverings so faintly tinted that they might have been wraiths of their own forgotten beauty-mirrors framed in tarnished gold, the glass too dim to reflect anything more substantial than a mist. But there was no dust on the exquisite old china which graced the mantelpiece, on the William and Mary cabinet, on the elegant pie-crust table between the windows. If the room breathed the very atmosphere of disuse, it was to the eye most beautifully kept. Craig Lester’s eye was a discerning one. At a single glance it provided him with a good deal of food for thought.

He saw Rosamond seat herself, took the big winged chair which she offered him, and observed with satisfaction that her eyes were, as he had hoped, not brown or grey, but that very dark blue. But like the room, she was pale. Her lips should have been redder, and there should have been colour in her cheeks. And she was thin-the delicate line of the cheek fell in a little. He saw that her clothes were shabby-an old tweed skirt, an old blue jumper, thick country shoes. The shoes looked damp, and there was moisture caught in her hair. He felt suddenly ashamed of his own warm coat. If she had been out in those thin clothes, and he was sure she had-