"That," Meg said, triumphantly, "is precisely why I'm so eager to come. When you've been an underling all your life you can't imagine what a joy it is to be top dog occasionally." "In that respect," Jan said firmly, "it must be turn and turn about. I won't let you come unless you promise--swear, here and now--that when I consider you are looking fagged--'a wispy wraith,' as Daddie used to say--if I command you to take a day in bed, in bed you will stay till I give you leave to get up. Unless you promise me this, the contract is off." "I'll promise anything you like. The idea of being _pressed_ to remain in bed strikes me as merely comic. You have evidently no notion how persons in a subordinate position ought to be treated. Bed, indeed!" "I think you might have waited till I got back before you parted with your hair." Jan's tone was decidedly huffy. "Now don't nag. That subject is closed. What about _your_ hair. Do you know it is almost white?" "And what more suitable for a maiden aunt? As that is to be my _rôle_ for the future I may as well look the part." "But you don't--that's what I complain of. The whiter your hair grows the younger your face gets. You're a contradiction, a paradox, you provoke conjecture, you're indecently noticeable. Mr. Ross would have loved to paint you." Jan shook her head. "No, Daddie never wanted to paint anything about me except my arms." "He'd want to paint you now," Meg insisted obstinately. "_I_ know the sort of person he liked to paint." "He never would paint people unless he _did_ like them," Jan said, smiling as at some recollection. "Do you remember how he utterly refused to paint that rich Mr. Withells down at Amber Guiting?" "I remember," and Meg laughed. "He said Mr. Withells was puffy and stippled." * * * * * Tony had been cold ever since he reached the Gulf of Lyons, and he wondered what could be the matter with him, for he never remembered to have felt like this before. He wondered miserably what could be the reason why he felt so torpid and shivery, disinclined to move, and yet so uncomfortable when he sat still. After his bath, on that first night in London, tucked into a little bed with a nice warm eiderdown over him, he still felt that horrid little trickle of ice-cold water down his spine and could not sleep. His cot was in Auntie Jan's room with a tall screen round it. The rooms in the flat were small, tiny they seemed to Tony, after the lofty spaciousness of the bungalow in Bombay, but that didn't seem to make it any warmer, because Auntie Jan's window was wide open as it would go--top and bottom--and chilly gusts seemed to blow round his head in spite of the screen. Ayah and little Fay were in the nursery across the passage, where there was a fire. There was no fire in this wind-swept chamber of Auntie Jan's.