How suddenly “right” my dear old silver-and-crystal toilette things look against the setting of the Sheraton dressing-table with the plate-glass top! To think that one dismal wet day I nearly packed them all up and sent them off by Mrs. Skinner to be “put away,” and the price thereof turned into new boots! “Boots a poor typist must have,” I argued. “Silver-topped bottles and luxuries of that sort she doesn’t need any more.” How frightfully glad I am, now, that I hadn’t the heart to do it after all, that I sent my shoes to be re-soled instead—and that all my own monogrammed brushes are mirrored in the oval glass beside that lustre jar of rich, mahogany-coloured wall-flowers that, next to my own dark head and its moving reflections, seem to give the deepest touch of colour in the room. I suppose the girls put those there—Yes! That’s another shock. The _sisters_! That _he_ should have sisters like—— A tap at the door. “Come in!” Enter, explosively, the excited little white dog, followed by a large and shiny copper can, and the eyes—they seem to dominate everything else about that child!—of Theodora. “Brought you some hot water”—in a meek and muffled voice. “Dinner is—(Put those _down_, Cariad! He _knows_ people’s slippers aren’t for him to eat!) Dinner is at eight. _I’m_ not supposed to come down.” Here the huge brown eyes turned ruefully for a moment from me to the gleaming sheath of the new frock that I’d just thrown over the brass rail of the bed. I guessed the thought behind them. They longed for another satisfying stare at it—_on_ me. Why shouldn’t I have this child fond of me? “Shall I say good-night now, then, Theo?” I suggested. “Or—if you tell me which your room is, shall I come in after I’m dressed?” “Oh!” exclaimed Theo, bell-mouthed. “_Gem!_” Then, carefully muffling the voice again, “That’s the school-room door opposite—between the corridor window and the picture of ‘Delia in Arcady.’ Thanks _awf’ly_, Nancy. (_Come_ along, Cariad!)” Not every engaged girl has such a walk-over with “his” people! But I think Theo would approve of me as a sister-in-law, if she were going to have the chance! I shouldn’t mind _her_!... On second thoughts, I don’t know whether I am so pleased after all that these people are so kind and welcoming and different from what I had expected. Wouldn’t it be almost easier for me in some ways if his mother and his sisters _were_ the “collection of frosty-faces” (as Miss Robinson expresses it) whom I’d anticipated meeting? I was prepared; I could have coped with _them_. Why has he got sisters like these—just the kind of girls I could imagine sisters of _mine_? Why _must_ his mother be so sweet to me, without a gleam of the “designing-little-minx-of-a-typist” look in her eyes, without—I verily believe—a thought of it in her heart? Ready to take to her arms the stranger within her gates whom she looks upon as her son’s lady-love—oh, it’s too embarrassing!