"I like our new lettering," he said thoughtfully. The words
"Stewart Ansell" were repeated again and again along the High
Street--curly gold letters that seemed to float in tanks of
glazed chocolate.

"Rather!" said Rickie. But he wondered whether one of the bonds
that kept the Ansell family united might not be their complete
absence of taste--a surer bond by far than the identity of it.
And he wondered this again when he sat at tea opposite a long row
of crayons--Stewart as a baby, Stewart as a small boy with large
feet, Stewart as a larger boy with smaller feet, Mary reading a
book whose leaves were as thick as eiderdowns. And yet again did
he wonder it when he woke with a gasp in the night to find a harp
in luminous paint throbbing and glowering at him from the
adjacent wall. "Watch and pray" was written on the harp, and
until Rickie hung a towel over it the exhortation was partially
successful.

It was a very happy visit. Miss Appleblosssom--who now acted as
housekeeper--had met him before, during her never-forgotten
expedition to Cambridge, and her admiration of University life
was as shrill and as genuine now as it had been then. The girls
at first were a little aggressive, for on his arrival he had been
tired, and Maud had taken it for haughtiness, and said he was
looking down on them. But this passed. They did not fall in love
with him, nor he with them, but a morning was spent very
pleasantly in snow-balling in the back garden. Ansell was rather
different to what he was in Cambridge, but to Rickie not less
attractive. And there was a curious charm in the hum of the shop,
which swelled into a roar if one opened the partition door on a