The countess did not pay much attention to the practical sister looking over her shoulders; she was thinking of Agnes and wondering what she was doing, and how her baby was getting on. "Have you heard from Agnes lately?" she asked. "Yes. Her husband has gone in for politics. But of course politics out there must be very different from what they are in England. You can't imagine Agnes as the wife of a politician. Tut-tut! Ridiculous!" "What did she call her little boy?" "Oh, gracious, don't ask me! Some perfectly absurd name. Could it be Xenophon? I know Claude laughed muchly when he heard it. Thank goodness, he wouldn't have let me choose such names for Mary and Ethel. I suppose Agnes is happy. She seems to be. I sometimes wonder where some of the members of our family get their taste for adventure." "But you've no idea what a lovely place Aphros is ... it lies in the middle of a circle of islands and...." "Yes, yes," Mrs. Savage interrupted, "but it's a long way from England, and the idea of living abroad doesn't appeal to me." "Don't you ever want to travel?" "Well, Claude and I had planned to go to Switzerland with a party this August, but of course the war put a stop to that." "By the way, isn't the war rather an adventure for Claude?" the countess asked, with a smile. "An adventure?" Mrs. Savage echoed. "It's a great inconvenience." She bustled out of the room to look after her own daughters and give Edna some advice about hers; soon after she was gone Gladys and Marjorie, the prototypes of those little girls in the front garden, strolled in to gossip with their eldest sister. Although it was nearly noon, they were only just out of bed, because they had been up late at a dance on the night before. Gladys, a girl of twenty, was very like her eldest sister at the same age. She was not quite so tall and perhaps she lacked her air of having been born to grandeur, but she was sufficiently like to make Dorothy wonder if her career would at all resemble her own. On the whole, she thought that probably herself and Agnes had exhausted the right of the Caffyns to astonish their neighbors. Gladys and Marjorie, the latter a charming new edition of the original Dorothy, with flashing deep-blue eyes, dark hair, and an Irish complexion, were already, at twenty and nineteen, too free to be ambitious. Twelve years had made a great difference to the liberty of girls in West Kensington, and Mr. Caffyn no longer objected to the young men who came to his house, mostly in uniform nowadays, which provided one more excuse for emancipation. Gladys and Marjorie frequently arrived home unchaperoned from dances at three o'clock in the morning, and their father did not turn a hair; perhaps he was already so white that he was incapable of showing any more marks of life's fitful fever. No doubt he had long ago given up the ladies of Lauriston Mansions, and probably at no period in his career was he more qualified to be the secretary of the Church of