Nuttie was very much pleased with her own pretty tennis dress; but she had no personal vanity for herself, only for her mother. The knowledge that she was no beauty was no grievance to her youthful spirits; but when her father surveyed them in the hall, she looked for his verdict for her mother as if their relations were reversed. 'Ha! Well, you certainly are a pretty creature, Edda,' he said graciously. 'You'll pass muster! You want nothing but style. And, hang it! you'll do just as well without it, if the Canoness will only do you justice. Faces like that weren't given for nothing.' She blushed incarnadine and accepted one of his kisses with a pleasure, at which Nuttie wondered, her motherly affection prompting her to murmur in his ear-- 'And Ursula?' 'She'll not cut you out; but she is Egremont enough to do very fairly. Going already?' 'If you would come with us,' she said wistfully, to the horror of Nuttie, who was burning to be at the beginning of all the matches. 'I? oh no! I promised old Will to look in, but that won't be till late in the day, or I shall have to go handing all the dowagers into the dining-room to tea.' 'Then I think we had better go on. They asked us to come early, so as to see people arrive and know who they are.' _They_ was a useful pronoun to Alice, who felt it a liberty to call her grand-looking sister-in-law, Jane--was too well-bred to term her Mrs. William. The mother and daughter crossed the gardens, Nuttie chattering all the way about the tennis tactics she had picked up from Blanche, while her mother answered her somewhat mechanically, wondering, as her eye fell on the square squat gray church tower, what had become of the earnest devotion to church work and intellectual pursuits that used to characterise the girl. True, always both mother and daughter had hitherto kept up their church-going, and even their Sunday-school habits, nor had any hindrance come in their way, Mr. Egremont apparently acquiescing in what he never shared. But these things seemed, in Ursula's mind, to have sunk out of the proportion they held at Bridgefield, no longer to be the spirit of a life, but mere Sunday duties and occupations. Was this wicked world getting a hold of the poor child? Which was duty? which was the world? This was the thought that perplexed Alice, too simple as yet to perceive that Ursula's former absorption had been in the interests that surrounded her and her companions, exactly as they were at present, and that the real being had yet to work itself out. For herself, Alice did not think at all. She was rejoicing in her restored husband, and his evident affection. Her duty towards him was in her eyes plain. She saw, of course, that he had no religion, but she accepted the fact like that of bad weather; she loved him, and she loved her daughter; she said her prayers with all her heart for them, she hoped, and she did her best, without trying to go below the surface.