"We certainly can't consume all these!" echoed Miss Lowe. "The children must eat up some of them for supper. It will take days to get through such a larderful! For once they'll be satiated with jam-tarts. Well, I suppose it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Still, if the baby comes to an untimely end through acute dyspepsia, I shan't be in the least surprised." Mrs. Marsden seemed determined to entertain her guests, and had yet another surprise in store for them. She beckoned them into a little private parlour of her own, and showed them the paintings of her eldest boy, a youth of eighteen, who, she proudly assured them, had never had a drawing lesson in his life. It was not difficult to believe her, for the specimens were so funny that the spectators could hardly keep their faces straight. Horses with about as much shape as those in a child's Noah's ark, figures resembling Dutch dolls in rigidity, flowers daubed on with the crudest colours, and the final effort, a bird's-eye view of the village, consisting chiefly of tiled roofs and chimney-pots in lurid red and black. "No doubt it has afforded him the supremest delight," whispered Miss Lowe to Miss Barton, "and it's evidently a subject of the utmost satisfaction to his mother, so I won't make carping criticisms, but take it as a moral for the necessity of due humility over one's own productions. Perhaps mine would be as diverting to an Academician as his are to me." In the same room Mrs. Marsden showed her visitors a mysterious oil-painting, black with age and hideous beyond compare, which she informed them was an original portrait of Nell Gwynn. She supposed it to be immensely valuable, and was keeping it safe until prices rose a little higher still, after the war, when she had hopes of launching it on the auction rooms in London, and realizing a sum that would make her family's fortune. "An ambition she'll never realize in this wide world," said Miss Barton afterwards, "for the thing is absolutely not genuine. It's not the right period for Nell Gwynn, and it's so atrociously badly painted that it's obviously the work of some village artist. She's in for a big disappointment some day, poor woman! I hadn't the heart to squash her, when she seemed so proud of it--especially as she was still a little huffy that we hadn't consumed her black-currant tarts!"