She laughed happily. "Fancy wanting London gaieties when you can have this!" she said. "I sang for joy this morning when I woke up and found myself here instead of in London." "Yes, that's all very well," he said. "I feel like that myself, though I suppose that at my age no satisfaction is quite as hilarious as it is at yours. But it isn't only the gaieties that you miss by cutting yourself off from London. It's being in the swim. When you've been in the swim as long as I have, you know how much of it is necessary to you and how much isn't. And you don't lose all that you've gained for yourself when you begin to sit lightly to it all. But you have to gain it first." "I'm not sure that I want to gain more than I have," she said. "I have heaps of friends, and we see a good many of them down here. I like seeing those who really do count in that way; you get to know them better. It's the background of life that I love so in the country. You belong to yourself more. Things come to you and you don't have to go out to find them. I believe you feel that too, Daddy." "Yes, I do," he said, "more than I should have thought possible a year ago. But still I can't see that it is quite the right thing for you to bury yourself down here entirely." "Don't you feel that it's nice to have me here to welcome you when you come home?" she asked. "Oh, my darling," he said, "nothing could be better--for me. It's you I'm thinking of." Barbara had been sent off, protesting, to a 'family' in Paris a fortnight before. She was to come home in August, when Young George would also come home for his summer holidays; otherwise she had declared she would not consent to go at all. Beatrix was in London with Lady Handsworth, enjoying her second season, but not with quite the same youthful abandon as she had enjoyed her first. Miss Waterhouse was away visiting, but would come back shortly, either to Abington or to the house in Cadogan Place, wherever the headquarters of the family should be. Caroline after a week in London had pressed for Abington, and had had her own way. It was true that her way would bring most pleasure to her father. His centre of gravity had changed from London to the country. Except on occasions, his work occupied him not more than three days a week, and with her at Abington his home was indisputably there, as it would not have been otherwise. But he was getting to be a little anxious about this increasing disinclination of hers to follow out the life that seemed natural for a girl of her birth and upbringing. Both his sisters-in-law had spoken to him about it, Lady Grafton as well as Lady Handsworth. She was not doing herself justice. They knew that he did not want to give her up, and there was no necessity for her to marry just yet. But she ought not to cut herself off from the surroundings in which girls of her sort did find husbands, the surroundings in which he himself, and all of them, had found wives and husbands.