on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next
alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.

"You couldn't manage to let her keep the toy, then?"

"The toy?" Imogen was blank.

He enlightened her. "Her maid, you know, who had to do her hair."

"Oh, Felkin! No," Imogen's face was a little quizzical, "it couldn't be
managed. I thought it over, what you said about sacrificing other people's
needs to her luxuries, and felt that you were right. So I put it to her,
very, very gently, of course, very tactfully, so that I believe that she
thinks that it was she who initiated the idea. Perhaps she _had_ intended
from the first to send her back; it was so obvious that a woman as poor as
she is ought not to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little
vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad
I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another
woman. It's a little degrading for both of them, I think."

Jack, who theoretically disapproved of all such undemocratic gauds, was
sure that Mrs. Upton was much better off without her maid; yet something of
the pathos of that image remained with him--the child deprived of its toy;
something, too, of discomfort over that echo of her father that he now and
then detected in Imogen's serene sense of rightness.

This discomfort, this uneasy sense of echoes, returned more than once
in the days that followed. Mrs. Upton seemed, as yet, to have made very
little difference in the situation; she had glided into it smoothly,
unobtrusively--a silken shadow; when she was among them it was of that she