The apple-tree house stood on the grass-plot at the far end of the kitchen garden. The apple-tree had had no apples on it for years. It was so old that it leaned over at a slant; it stretched out two great boughs like twisted arms, and was propped up by a wooden post under each armpit. The breast of its trunk rested on a cross-beam. The posts and the cross-beam were the doorway of the house, and the branches were its roof and walls. Anthony had given it to Veronica to live in, and Veronica had given it to Nicky. It was Nicky's and Ronny's house. The others were only visitors who were not expected to stay. There was room enough for them both to stand up inside the doorway, to sit down in the middle, and to lie flat at the far end. "What more," said Nicky, "do you want?" He thought that everybody would be sure to laugh at him when he played with Bonny in the apple-tree house. "I don't care a ram if they do," he said. But nobody ever did, not even Mr. Parsons. Only Frances, when she passed by that way and saw Nicky and Bonny sitting cramped and close under their roof-tree, smiled unwillingly. But her smile had in it no sort of mockery at all. Nicky wondered why. "Is it," said Dorothy one morning, "that Ronny doesn't look as if she was Uncle Bartie's daughter, or that Uncle Bartie looks as if he wasn't Ronny's father?" However suddenly and wantonly an idea struck Dorothy, she brought it out as if it had been the result of long and mature consideration. "Or is it," said Vera, "that I don't look as if I were Ronny's mother?" Her eyes had opened all their length to take in Dorothy. "No. I think it is that Uncle Bartie looks--" Frances rushed in. "It doesn't matter, my dear, what you think." "It will some day," said Dorothy. It was perhaps the best thing she could have said, as showing that she was more interested in the effect she would produce some day than in the sensation she had created there and then. "May I go round to Rosalind's after lessons?" "You may." "And may I stay to lunch if they ask me?" "You may stay as long as they care to have you. Stay to tea, stay to dinner, if you like." Dorothy knew by the behaviour of her mother's face that she had scored somewhere, somehow. She also knew that she was in disgrace and yet not in disgrace; which, if you came to think of it, was a funny thing. About this time Frances began to notice a symptom in herself. She was apt to resent it when Vera discussed her children with her. One late afternoon she and Anthony were alone with Vera. Captain Cameron had not come round that day, and Bartie had gone into town to consult either his solicitor or a specialist. He was always consulting one or the other. "You're wrong, you two," said Vera. "You think Michael's tender and Nicky's hard and unimpressionable. Michael's hard. You won't have to bother about Michael's feelings." "Michael's feelings," said Frances, "are probably what I shall have to bother about more than anything."