No man ought to leave a child of twenty-two in sole charge of her capital, without trustees or anything. Eleanor came over to England simply asking to be robbed, simply asking for it.'

'Well, we did warn her against Caroline,' said Dorothy. 'We let her see the old girl's letters. We told her she would cadge, borrow or steal from anyone in the world that she could get hold of-Eleanor needn't have gone near her when she went to London.'

'Oh, catch Miss Eleanor taking advice! Dear me no. More tea, please, Mums. But she certainly seems to have got more than she bargained for from Caroline. Apparently she used to lend her money when she was alive, looked after her while she was ill, and finally arranged the funeral and saw the undertakers, and everything.'

'I always said,' observed Mr. Smith, 'and I say it again: Caroline should have gone on the Old Age Pension. She used to say it wasn't dignified, but it would have been far more dignified than borrowing from her relatives and being in debt to the tradesmen.'

'Oh, you can't alter people like Caroline. She always thought she knew better than anyone. She was always going to do something extraordinary.'

'Oh, she was extraordinary all right,' laughed Betty. 'She was an extraordinary nuisance, anyway.'

'Well,' reflected Dorothy, soothed by tea, warmth and sandwiches into toleration. 'I suppose that making a nuisance of herself was the only way she had left of making herself important. It can't have been much of a life, can it? for a woman of over seventy, living alone in lodgings, in debt to her landlady, wearing our cast-off clothes, trotting round after jobs that never materialized, writing articles that nobody would publish, and eating bread and margarine for supper. There really was something rather pathetic about that awful room of hers - crowded with papers full of impossible schemes. I don't envy Eleanor the job of looking through them all. I don't suppose there can ever have been anyone whose life was much less important, or who had less influence on anybody else.'

'Well, she did get us to London, anyway. I suppose that if she hadn't died, and we hadn't gone to the funeral, we should have had to do our spring shopping in mouldy old Kingsport. Oh, Mums, I must show you my new blue three-piece. It's perfectly adorable, isn't it, Dot?'

'It is rather nice - and my evening frock. Do you know, skirts are getting lower and lower, Mums?'

'Well, of course, dears,' said Mrs. Smith gently. 'I don't like to seem heartless in any way, but it would have been a pity to waste the expense of going up to London, and it wasn't as though Caroline were more than your second cousin. I am very glad that you were able to do something really useful.'

'Nothing like combining business and pleasure, eh, girls?" Mr. Smith smothered a great yawn. 'Well, I'm off to bed. Don't you women sit gossiping till to-morrow.' He rose laboriously, and went to the door, but with his hand on the knob he turned. 'Good night, all. There is one thing; she'll never trouble us again this side the golden gates, poor Caroline.'

Mr. Smith, rope merchant of Marshington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, went upstairs to bed.

Chapter 1 : Basil Reginald Anthony St.