"I ought to have warned you that in the country we always dine at half-past seven. It was my fault," said Lady Grant. Penitence is usually as unconvincing as gratitude, and certainly nobody in the room, from Jasmine to Hargreaves the parlourmaid waiting to announce dinner, supposed for a moment that her ladyship was really assuming responsibility for the long wait. "I thought perhaps you might like one of father's pictures," Jasmine began. "Oh dear me ... oh yes," hemmed Lady Grant, who, to do her justice, did not want to hurt her niece's feelings, but who felt that the lusciousness of the scene presented might be too much for her husband's appetite. Sir Hector, craning at the picture, asked what the principal figure was holding in her basket. "Cherries, aren't they?" suggested Lettice. "Ah, yes, so they are," her father agreed. "Cherries.... Precisely.... Come, come, we mustn't let the soup get cold. The dessert can wait." On the wings of a dreary little titter they moved toward the dining-room; Sir Hector, leading the way like a turkey-cock in a farmyard, murmured, whether in pity for the dead brother who could no longer feel hungry or in compassion for his art: "Poor old Sholto. We must get it framed." _Chapter Three_ Jasmine woke up next morning to a vivid acceptance of the fact that from now onward her life would not be her own. She had been too weary the night before to grasp fully what this meant. Now, while she lay watching the sun streaming in through the blind, the value of the long fine day before her was suddenly depreciated. On an impulse to defeat misgiving she jumped out of bed, sent up the blind with a jerk that admitted Monday morning to her room like a jack-in-the-box, stared out over the wide expanse of pale blue winking sea, sniffed the English seaside odour, clambered up on her dressing-table to disentangle the blind, failed to do so, descended again, and began to wonder how she should occupy herself from six o'clock to nine. And after the long morning, what a day stretched before her! A little talk with Uncle Hector about her father, a little talk with Aunt May on the same subject, a lesson in golf from her cousins, and, worst of all, the heavy foundation stones of the threatened intimacy between her and Miss Crossfield to be placed in position. "We must get to know each other very well," Miss Crossfield had murmured when she said good night. "We must pull together." And this had been said with such a gloating anticipation of combined effort and with such a repressed malignity beneath it all that if Miss Crossfield had added "the teeth of these rich relatives," Jasmine would not have thought the phrase extravagant.