"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you must try to think of other people a little." "It would be difficult to think of anything else in Lonsdale Road, mother dear. Lily," she called out from the window, "come up and talk to me before the animals come roaring home to be fed." "Norah dear, I'd rather you didn't refer to your brothers and sisters like that," Mrs. Caffyn rebuked, with an attempt at authority that only made her daughter laugh. It may not have been a pleasant laugh to hear, and Mrs. Caffyn may have been right to leave the room with a shake of the head; but Norah's teeth were so white and regular that it was a delightful laugh to look at, and Norah was so intent on watching its effect in the glass that she did not notice her mother had gone away in vexation. Presently she and Lily were deep in the discussion of pompadour pads, so enthralling a subject that when Norah wanted to talk about her engagement it was nearly dinner-time, and she felt more than ever the injustice of not being able to invite her friend to the family meal. "I must talk to you about Wilfred," she said. "We must have a long talk, because I'm determined to have it settled." At that moment, with swinging of satchels and banging of doors and much noisy laughter, Agnes and Edna, getting on, respectively, for thirteen and fourteen, arrived back from the school that not so long ago Norah and Lily had themselves attended. "But it's impossible to talk now," grumbled Norah; and as if to accentuate the truth of this remark her brother Vincent, aged ten, came tearing down the road, dribbling a tin can before him and intoxicated with the news of having been chosen to play half-back for his class. In another two years, he boasted, he would be in the Eleven. "Why don't you come round to Shelley Mansions this evening?" Lily suggested. "We've invited some friends in." One of the stipulations made about Norah's friendship with Lily had been that she should never visit the home of her friend, about whose mother all sorts of queer stories were current in West Kensington. To challenge family opinion on this point seemed to her an excellent preliminary to challenging it more severely by insisting on being openly engaged to Wilfred Curlew. She hesitated for a moment, and then announced that she would come. "To supper?" Lily asked. After another moment's hesitation Norah promised firmly that she would, and her friend hurried away just as Cecil, a loutish boy with sleeves and trousers much too short for him, slouched back from St. James's. The house which a little while ago had been gently murmurous with that absorbing conversation about pompadour pads now reverberated with the discordant cries of a large family; an overpowering smell of boiled mutton and caper sauce ousted the perfumes from Norah's room; her eyes flashed with resentment, and she went down-stairs to take her place at table. II