if during the months of expectation she kept close her secret and if it were a boy, untrammeled by any obligations she should be at liberty to make her own decision about his up-bringing. More and more she was forming all her plans to fit the future of a boy, and one of her chief reasons for not relying upon the good will of the family was her desire to spare this son prenatal coddling by coddling herself. Dorothy might have found it hard to analyze justly all the motives that inspired her to take the step she did; but whatever they were, a hot morning in late September found her sitting at the window of her old room in Lonsdale Road. II If outwardly Lonsdale Road presented the same appearance as it had presented on that September morning twelve years ago when Dorothy, after washing her hair, made up her mind to be engaged to Wilfred Curlew, the standpoint from which she now looked out of her window was so profoundly changed that the road itself was transmuted by the alchemy of her mind to achieve the significant and incommunicable landscape of a dream. It was as if in looking at Lonsdale Road she were looking at herself, and a much truer self than she ever used to see portrayed in that old mirror upon her dressing-table. In an upper room of the house opposite a servant was dusting. Down below, amid that immemorial acrid smell of privet, two little girls were busily digging in the front garden. These were the daughters of her second sister, the rightful Dorothy, who was staying with her parents because her husband, Claude Savage, had left Norbiton for France with his regiment of territorials. Mrs. Savage, a dark, neat little woman, as capable a housewife as she had promised to become, and at twenty-eight not quite so annoying as formerly, came into the room from time to time and glanced out of the window to see that her little girls were not making themselves too dirty. "Hope they're not disturbing you with their chattering." "No, no," said the countess. "I like listening to them." Ah, there was Edna down below, not as twelve years ago giggling back from school with Agnes, but wheeling a perambulator and from time to time bending cautiously over to arrange the coverlet over her sleeping baby. Edna was a dull edition of Agnes, and already at twenty-six much more like Mrs. Caffyn than any of her sisters. Her chin was rather furry; she was indefinite, not so indefinite as her mother because modern education had not permitted to her what was formerly considered a prerogative of woman. Edna had been married for about three years to Walter Hume, a young doctor in Golders Green, who was stationed at some northern camp with the R.A.M.C. She, too, was staying with her parents. "Edna keeps on fussing with the coverlet," said Mrs. Savage, critically. "But she ought not to be walking along the sunny side of the pavement."