When she received the letter announcing the fact Miss Gibbs danced with delight. "Two pounds a week! Think of it!" Thus she besought her cousin Fanny, a rather full-blown young woman employed in a "drapery-house" at Brixton. "And easy hours--with an hour off for lunch! Isn't it lovely!" "You'll have the office 'commish' to pay," her cousin reminded her, "and I know all about those short hours! Sound well, but they generally want overtime out of you--without paying for it either!" "Do they?" Antonia's joy was momentarily checked. Then she recovered her spirits. "Anyway, even then it's a good post, and I can easily pay the commission out of two pounds!" "Yes, of course." Fanny, whose natural optimism was somewhat impaired by her experience in drapers' shops, cheered up also. "It's a grand opportunity for you, Toni, and mind you make the most of it." "Rather," returned Toni gaily. "I'm to start to-morrow, so this is my last free night. Aren't you glad some people are coming in to tea?" "Yes." Fanny, recalled to the immediate present, began her preparations for the tea-party. "Josh'll be pleased to hear of your luck, Toni; he's real fond of you, you know." "Is he?" Toni, pulling off her flannel blouse, spoke a trifle absently. "Yes. If I weren't fond of you myself I declare I'd be jealous! Don't know how it is, all the boys seem to take to you straight away, Toni, and you don't care a pin for any of 'em!" "Perhaps that's why," said Toni cheerfully, voicing a truth without in the least realizing it. "After all, who is there to care for? Jack Brown, or young Graves, or that funny little Walter Britton out of Lea and Harper's?" She plunged her glowing face into a basin of cold water as she spoke. "No. I s'pose they're not quite your sort." Fanny stared thoughtfully at her cousin. "I don't know how it is, Toni--you are my cousin, your father was Dad's own brother--and yet you're as different from us as--as chalk from cheese." She in her turn had uttered a profound truth. Between Toni and the rest of the commonplace lower-middle-class household was a great gulf fixed, a gulf which was the more inexplicable because it was clearly visible to the parties on either side of the chasm. Red-faced, brawny Fred Gibbs, the butcher, his equally red-faced, though slightly more refined wife, and their several sons and daughters, belonging, most of them, to the category of "fine" boys and girls, were a good-humoured, kindly people enough; yet between them and the pretty, dark-eyed Antonia there was not the slightest vestige of resemblance, either in looks, manners, or disposition.