temper, and when Niko helped him to disengage himself from the muffler, he asked with a growl if the fool thought he was spinning a top. However, when he entered the dining-room and saw poor Sholto Grant's pictures all aglow in the rich horizontal sunlight, he cheered up for a moment, until a suspicion that his nephew Eneas was proposing to sell him the pictures intervened and spoilt his pleasure. He at once began to criticize and cheapen the pictures so ruthlessly that Jasmine could hardly keep back her tears. In Crispano's Cafe at Sirene she had once heard a futurist painter criticizing her father's pictures, and she had been so angry that she had upset the coffee over him on her way out. To hear Uncle Matthew one might suppose that such bad pictures had never been painted since the world began; yet she could say nothing. "I'm sorry you don't like them," said Aunt Cuckoo, "because Jasmine has brought them back for you all the way from Sirene." "Eh? What's that?" demanded Uncle Matthew, twisting round on one of his sticks and thumping the floor with the other. "Who's Jasmine?" "Jasmine is poor Sholto's daughter." "What? Another?" the old gentleman growled. "No, he only had one." "I can't think why people want to have children at all," Uncle Matthew sniffed. Eneas congratulated his wife with a complacent glance on their reserve about Baby. "So you brought back these pictures for me, did you?" the old gentleman continued. "Humph! I did buy one of your father's pictures a long time ago, and I don't say it was bad, but he asked too much for it. And now if I accept these I shall have to buy frames for them," he concluded indignantly. But the insistency of Sholto's pictures, the indubitable, the positive proclamation of their being what they were, the full value they gave of blue water, bright flowers, and rosy cheeks, softened the old gentleman's heart. They really did express for him his own taste in art, and inasmuch as they were a present he could not quite conceal his gratification. "I hope you haven't gone and ordered a very extravagant dinner for me," he said gruffly to hide as far as possible the least amenity in his manner. Aunt Cuckoo reassured him, and, the gong ringing at that moment, they moved toward the dining-room. Uncle Matthew disdained an arm, preferring to rely upon his two sticks. "Wonderful how he bears himself for an old gentleman, isn't it?" whispered Uncle Eneas to Jasmine. "We're a long-lived family. There's no doubt about that." He was too anxious for the success of the evening to brag more particularly about his own athletic qualities.