Miss Bremerton smiled and nodded. They stood colloguing in the twilight for ten minutes more. CHAPTER III 'I say, Pamela, who _is_ this female, and why has she descended on us?' The speaker was Desmond Mannering. He was sitting on the edge of a much dilapidated arm-chair in the room which had been the twins' "den" from their childhood, in which Pamela's governess even, before the girl's school years, was allowed only on occasional and precarious footing. Here Pamela dabbed in photography, made triumphant piles of the socks and mittens she kept from her father's eye, read history, novels, and poetry, and wrote to her school friends and the boys she had met in Scotland. Ranged along the mantelpiece were numbers of snapshots--groups and single figures--taken by her, with results that showed her no great performer. At the moment, however, Pamela was engaged in marking Desmond's socks. She was very jealous of her sisterly prerogative in the matter of Desmond's kit, and personal affairs generally. Forest was the only person she would allow to advise her, and one or two innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had produced a good deal of irritation. Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance. 'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war charities.' 'You mean because she costs so much?' 'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily. 'My hat!--and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash. There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden. The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off, Forest tells me?' 'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather pinched lips. 'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.' 'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I liked.' 'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd spent eighteen hundred at that sale.' 'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.' Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at school: