“Why, what a delightful surprise. The rain is so dreary, I was simply longing for firelight, but I had no idea an invitation was on its way.” “Then may I borrow one of your cushions?” Ursula was a spectacle of pretty, though rather childish excitement. She pulled Aunt Lavvy by the hand into the next-door room, and arranged her in the one armchair, and poked the smouldering coal to flames, and tugged at the window-curtains anew, and then settled herself with crossed legs, tailor-fashion, on the rag-mat on the opposite side of the hearth. She looked over at Aunt Lavvy with an air of affectionate content. “It was lonely--till I brought you in,” she said. “I sometimes wish I shared a room with somebody.” “This one would be too small, of course. But you’ve made it look so nice, Ursula dear.” “Have I? But you can’t do much with a bed and dressing-table sticking themselves out .... It ought really to be a sitting-room with a bedroom next door.” And Ursula’s gaze at Aunt Lavvy was full and pure and empty of all significance. Aunt Lavvy reflected for a moment or two ... and understood. “Let’s pretend, then,” she suggested at last, her plump little mouth bent to a whimsical smile, “that I have been whisked away to Terra del Fuego on a broomstick, so that you are able to have my room for your bedroom, and could do as you liked with this one. How would you plan it?” Aunt Lavvy might be a sweet-scented malignant little bundle of implacability, but she had to her credit a delightfully light and sensitive touch with the situation. Ursula, to whom clumsiness would have been unbearable in her own inspired mood of fine execution, appreciated the bland twist by which Aunt Lavvy had made it appear that _she_ was to be the one eliminated from tenancy. “Well--help me, then! I’d have the wallpapers that very deep cream tint that you’re so fond of, Aunt Lavvy----” “More primrose than cream,” supplied Aunt Lavvy. “And wistaria cretonne curtains, Ursula, and the same on two armchairs, and a lot of cushions, mauve and blue and primrose-yellow. Wouldn’t that be rather quaint and pretty?” “And a bluey-mauve carpet, also the colour of wistaria.” Ursula threw the same enthusiasm into these furnishings as though she were not intuitively leading Aunt Lavvy on to describe exactly how, again and again, from the farther side of the door, she must have imagined Ursula’s room furnished to her own private desires. The more these desires were allowed to escape and take form, the easier would she fall to the bribe ... presently, when the time came to talk about Hal. “And your lovely tea-set--Spode, isn’t it? Would you bring that in here, and have shelves put up for it?”