Then she had tried to make him tell her why it was that he had abandoned some of the schemes of improvement that had certainly been in his mind during the first weeks of their engagement. But he had not been very communicative, and had put the blame mostly, as she understood him, on the "beastly pits" and the very low dividends they had been earning during the past six months. Letty, however, did not in the least believe that the comparatively pinched state of their finances, which, bride as she was, she was already brooding over, was wholly or even mainly due to the pits. She set her little white teeth in sudden anger as she said to herself that it was _not_ the pits--it was Lady Tressady! George was crippled now because of the large sums his mother had not been ashamed to wring from him during the last six months. Letty--George's wife--was to go without comforts and conveniences, without the means of seeing her friends and taking her proper position in the world, because George's mother--a ridiculous, painted old woman, who went in for flirtations and French gowns, when she ought to be subsiding quietly into caps and Bath chairs--would sponge upon his very moderate income, and take what did not belong to her. "I am _certain_ there is something in the background!" said Letty to herself, as she sat looking at the ugly house--"something that she is ashamed of, and that she doesn't tell George. She _couldn't_ spend all that money on dress! I believe she is a wicked old woman--she has the most extraordinary creatures at her parties." The girl's delicate face stiffened vindictively as she fell brooding for the hundredth time over Lady Tressady's enormities. Then suddenly the garden door opened, and Letty, looking up, saw that George was on the threshold, waving his hand to her. He had left her that morning--almost for the first time since their marriage--to go and see his principal agent and discuss the position of affairs. As he approached her, she noticed instantly that he was looking tired and ruffled. But the sight of her smoothed his brow. He threw himself down on the grass at her feet, and pressed his lips to the delicately tended hand that lay upon her lap. "Have you missed me, madame?" he said, peremptorily. Preoccupied as she was, Letty must needs flush and smile, so well she knew from his eager eye that she pleased him, that he noticed the pretty gown she had put on for luncheon, and that all the petting his absence had withdrawn from her for an hour or two had come back to her. Other women--more or less of her type--had found his ways beguiling before now. He took courtship as an art, and had his own rooted ideas as to how women should be treated. Neither too gingerly nor too sentimentally--but, above all, with variety! He repeated his question insistently; whereupon Letty said, with her pert brightness, thinking all the time of the house, "I'm _not_ going to make you vain. Besides, I have been frightfully busy."