"Wait a minute, Percy dear," said Tilly quickly. "I want to talk to you--all of you. Sit down, everybody. Father!" "My daughter?" "Come and sit here, please!" "A round-table conference?" enquired Mr. Welwyn amiably. "Capital!" Tilly upon her own quarter-deck was a very different being from the frightened little alien whom we saw at Shotley Beauchamp. In two minutes the Welwyn family had meekly packed themselves round the octagonal table. Tilly took the chair. "Now, then, all of you," she began, with a suspicion of a high-strung quaver in her voice--"Father, Mother, Percy, and little ’Melia--listen to me! You know, no one better, that when I went down to Shotley Beauchamp on Saturday I meant to act perfectly square to Dicky’s people--tell them who I was and what I was, and that I worked for my living and so on; and generally make sure that they did n’t take me in on false pretences. Is that correct?" "Yes--quite correct," chorused the family. "Well," continued Tilly defiantly--"I have n’t done it! I have n’t said a word! There! I _couldn’t_! I have seen Dicky’s people, and their house, and their prosperity, and the way they look at things. They’re a pretty tough proposition, the Mainwarings. They are no better born than we are; but they are rich, and stupid, and conceited, and purse-proud--" "Tilly! Tilly!" said Mrs. Welwyn, scandalised to hear the gentry so miscalled. "Yes, they _are_, Mother!" cried the girl passionately. "You don’t know what I have had to put up with this week-end, when Dicky was n’t by. Why--" "Dicky," observed Mr. Welwyn dryly, "is also a Mainwaring, Tilly." "Dicky," replied Tilly, with feminine contempt for the laws of heredity and environment, "may be a Mainwaring, but he does n’t take after the rest of the family. But never mind Dicky for a moment. What I want to say is this. In dealing with people of this kind--people who regard those who have no money as so much dirt beneath their feet--there is only one thing that pays; and that thing," she concluded with intense conviction, "is--swank, swank, swank!" "Good old Tilly!" shouted Percy enthusiastically; and the rest of the Welwyns, quite carried away by their small despot’s earnestness, beat upon the table with their fists. "The Mainwarings swanked for my benefit, I can tell you," continued Tilly, with cheeks glowing hotly. "They laid off to me about their town house and their country house and their shooting and their hunting and their grand relations; and they did their best--especially the daughter--to make me feel like a little dressmaker who has come in for the day." "I bet you stood up to them, Sis," said the admiring Percy. Tilly smiled in a dreamy, reminiscent fashion. "I did," she said. "I matched them, brag for brag. They asked who you were, Mother. I said you were a Banks--one of _the_ Bankses--of Bedfordshire!"