dead, had been a cousin. The cottage stood within the enclosure of the
park, and to their connection with the big house the sisters owed a
number of amenities,--game in winter, flowers and vegetables in
summer--which were of importance to their small income. Cynthia Welwyn,
however, could never have passed as anybody's dependent. She thanked her
cousin occasionally for the kindnesses of which his head gardener and his
game-keeper knew much more than he did; and when he said
impatiently--"Please never thank for that sort of thing!" she dropped the
subject as lightly as she had raised it. Secretly she felt that such
things, and much more, were her due. She had not got from life all she
should have got; and it was only natural that people should make it up to
her a little.

For Cynthia, though she had wished to marry, was unmarried, and a secret
and melancholy conviction now sometimes possessed her that she would
remain Cynthia Welwyn to the end. She knew very well that in the opinion
of her friends she had fallen between two stools. Her neighbour, Sir
Richard Watson, had proposed to her twice,--on the last occasion some two
years before the war. She had not been able to make up her mind to accept
him, because on the whole she was more in love with her cousin, Philip
Buntingford, and still hoped that his old friendship for her might turn
to something deeper. But the war had intervened, and during its four
years she and Buntingford had very much lost sight of each other. She had
taken her full share in the county war work; while he was absorbed body
and soul by the Admiralty.

And now that they were meeting again as of old, she was very conscious,
in some undefined way, that she had lost ground with him. Uneasily she
felt that her talk sometimes bored him; yet she could not help talking.
In the pre-war days, when they met in a drawing-room full of people, he