The weariness of being without these kaleidoscopic friends of theirs had already beset him. They were still in time to find the old level again. It would certainly be a freezing world without the Leightons. Everybody knew that one might get social advantages with the Dudgeons, but one had always a ripping time with the Leightons. Miss Meredith, on her part, began to wonder, now that Mr. Symington was warned and would keep Robin from feeling the desirability of the girl whom two men were after, whether Robin himself might be more gently weaned than by thus being borne away on an open rupture. Robin was in the position of a man who had been brought up by mother and sister. Practically, whatever he had touched all his life had remained his own, sacred and inviolate. It seemed that Mabel ought to have remained his own merely because he had once stretched out his hand in her direction. Then, he began to find that he reckoned with a family which had been taught unselfishness. Isobel, to do her justice, always imagined that Mabel from the reserve of her welcome on the occasion of her arrival, resented her presence at the White House. She noticed that of all the girls to welcome her, Mabel kept a constrained silence. This she immediately put down to a personal distaste of herself, and controlled her actions accordingly. From the first moment of greeting her aunt and uncle, and sitting down to table, she upheld a sweetness of character which was unassailable, and which put Mabel’s distrait manner into rather wicked relief. Isobel’s was a nature, formed and articulate, entirely independent of the feelings and sympathies of others, a nature which could thrive and blossom on any trouble and disappointment, so long as these were not her own. She had learned in the mixed teaching of her rather stranded life, that very little trouble or disappointment came in the way of those who could see what they wanted and grab with both hands accordingly. She determined to grab with both hands every benefit to be derived from being leader in the Leighton family. She had come there with the intention of being leader. Before the meal was over, she had gained the good opinion of all except Mabel, an intentional exclusion on her part. Mabel had received her without effusion. Here was rivalry. In the most methodical and determined manner, she began a long siege of those rights and privileges which Mabel, as head of the Leighton girls, had never had really questioned before. She supplied a link in their musical circle, incomplete before. She could sing. Her methods were purely technical and so highly controlled, that the rather soulful playing of the Leighton girls shrank a little into a background of their own making. Isobel’s voice was like a clear photograph, developed to the last shred of minuteness. One heard her notes working with the precision of a musical box. The tiring nature of her accomplishments was never evident at a first performance.