"Her hair belongs to her! She can bleach it if she wishes!" The little figure rose to its altitude of four feet seven inches and surveyed the scandalmongers with wrathful eyes. "I have said that there was nothing between Miss Saxham and Count von Herrnung"—the little voice was crystal-cold: "I should be extremely obliged to all of you if you will understand this clearly! Miss Saxham is engaged to my husband’s cousin, Alan Sherbrand."—Had Franky heard that stately reference to my husband, he would have been "bowled," to quote himself. "Franky likes him, and so do I, tremendously! We’re both keen on their bringing off the match!" There was another resounding silence. Brayham snored melodiously. Then Trixie Wastwood said with her Pierrot smile: "Really, Kitts, it was—hardly cricket not to have warned us!" While Mrs. Charterhouse added in tones of iced velvet: "Regard me also as prone beneath Miss Saxham’s Number Eight shoes. Did you say her _fiancé_ was a cousin of Lord Norwater’s? Not possibly the son of the uncle who died quite recently? Captain the Hon. Noel Sherbrand, late of the Royal Gunners.... My husband used to know him before—people left off!" "It is the same. He muddled his career somehow, and—most people cut him! But he is _dead_," said Margot very deliberately, "and his son, if we have no—" the delicate cheeks flushed with sudden vivid crimson—"his son is perfectly tophole and Franky’s next heir. We met him in June in Paris, and so did Pat Saxham! How do any of you know she didn’t tint her hair to please _him_." "Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas—it was the other man who paid!" "Odd, isn’t it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord Norwater in—a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!" "Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with—_that_! How dare—" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm. "I’ve got you! You’re not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What _pigs_ we have been!"