nothing of the elaborate art of cutting one's coat according to the
cloth. Nor could she ever be brought to understand that there are only
twenty shillings in a pound--and that at the present moment even twenty
shillings were worth considerably less than they appeared to be.

There are certain people in the world who seem cast for the part of
onlooker. Of these Penelope was one. Evenly her life had slipped along
with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses,
entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the
lives of some. Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on.

Naturally of an observant turn of mind, she had learned to penetrate the
veil that hangs behind the actions of humanity, into the secret,
temperamental places whence those actions emanate, and had achieved a
somewhat rare comprehension and tolerance of her fellows.

From her father, who had been for thirty years the arbiter of affairs
both great and small in a country parish and had yet succeeded in
retaining the undivided affection of his flock, she had inherited a spice
of humorous philosophy, and this, combined with a very practical sense of
justice, enabled her to accept human nature as she found it--without
contempt, without censoriousness, and sometimes with a breathless
admiration for its unexpectedly heroic qualities.

She it was who alone had some slight understanding of Nan Davenant's
complexities--complexities of temperament which both baffled the
unfortunate possessor of them and hopelessly misled the world at large.

The Davenant history showed a line of men and women gifted beyond the
average, the artistic bias paramount, and the interpolation of a