It was rather a charming house, with a long garden, shut in by a high wall, and the first night they were established there Faith found Peg leaning out of her bedroom window, which overlooked it, her elbows resting on the stone sill, and a look of gloomy despondency in her handsome eyes. Faith slipped an arm round her. "What's the matter, Peg?" she asked. She was very fond of Peg and quick to recognize her varying moods. Peg answered gruffly, without her usual cheeriness. "I'm fed up! I don't belong here! What right have I got to be in a house like this, and sleeping in a room like this?" She turned round sharply, her blue eyes taking in every detail of the expensively furnished room behind them. She had chosen its wallpaper herself, which was too bright, and a mass of extraordinary looking birds. She had chosen the carpet, too, which was a curious mixture of greens and yellows, with a satin quilt on the bed to match. The furniture was white enamel, and both the big chairs in the room had a brilliant cushion of peacock green. "It looks--uncommon," so Faith had said slowly, when she was first introduced to the finished result, but neither she nor the Beggar Man really liked it, as Peg had been quick to perceive. "At any rate, I've got to sleep in it, and nobody else," she said in defiance. "And she ought to have nightmare every night," so Forrester remarked afterwards rather grimly to his wife. "Good gracious, what taste! It shouts at one!" Faith had defended Peg then, but she knew he was right, and she understood quite well now what Peg meant when she said she knew that she did not belong to the house. "But it's all nonsense," she declared warmly. "I love you. I should hate the house without you." Peg stooped and kissed her gratefully. "You're a nice little kid," she said with a sigh. "But--it's true all the same what I say. I don't belong. If I wasn't here you'd be living quite a different life, you and Mr. Forrester. He'd be asking his friends to the house, and you'd be giving dinner-parties. But you don't because I'm here, and he's afraid I shall shock them." "As if it matters what he's afraid of," Faith said sharply, but in her heart she knew that Peg was right; knew that, no matter how good and warm-hearted she might be, Peg grated on the Beggar Man forty times a day. Over and over again Faith had seen him frown and turn away at one of Peg's slangy terms, just as she had seen him frown that day when she had told him that the facts of her marriage were like a novelette, and she had substituted "fairy story" instead. Odd that then she had been so willing and anxious to please him, and that now she never considered him at all. Peg seemed to guess something of her thoughts, for she caught her by the arm, twisting her round so that they were face to face. "Look here," she said. "How long's it going on like this?" The bright colour rushed to Faith's cheeks. "What do you mean?"