found a good deal more tongue when she was alone with Cynthia than at
other times.

To the lively account that Cynthia had been giving her of the evening at
Beechmark, and the behaviour of Helena Pitstone, Lady Georgina had
listened in a sardonic silence; and at the end of it she said--

"What ever made the man such a fool?"

"Who?--Buntingford? My dear, what could he do? Rachel Pitstone was his
greatest friend in the world, and when she asked him just the week before
she died, how could he say No?" Lady Georgina murmured that in that case
Rachel Pitstone also had been a fool--

"Unless, of course, she wanted the girl to marry Buntingford. Why,
Philip's only forty-four now. A nice age for a guardian! Of course it's
not proper. 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