"We always got our photographs for nothing," smiled Mrs. Monarch.

"We might have brought some, my dear," her husband remarked.

"I'm not sure we have any left. We've given quantities away," she
explained to me.

"With our autographs and that sort of thing," said the Major.

"Are they to be got in the shops?" I inquired, as a harmless
pleasantry.

"Oh, yes; hers--they used to be."

"Not now," said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on the floor.



CHAPTER II.



I could fancy the "sort of thing" they put on the presentation-copies
of their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand. It
was odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them. If
they were now so poor as to have to earn shillings and pence, they
never had had much of a margin. Their good looks had been their
capital, and they had good-humouredly made the most of the career
that this resource marked out for them. It was in their faces, the
blankness, the deep intellectual repose of the twenty years of