There were half a dozen perfectly trained English servants who knew nothing about him but his superficial tastes, which they studied as easily and silently as possible to satisfy. And then there was Elise. Elise was his unmarried daughter; it made Mr. Brett’s sardonic deep lined mouth smile tenderly when he thought of Elise. She slipped in and out of the big sweet rooms as if she were a shaft of travelling sunshine. Elise was as pretty as a picture, and as gentle as the fall of dew on the wide emerald lawns. She was generally to be found in the garden, and when she was in the house she never looked as if it belonged to her. She looked as if she were one of the flowers waiting on a side table to be arranged by the stiff backed parlour-maid. Yet Elise could have had half a dozen houses if she had wanted them. She was dimly aware that her father would never set a limit to her desires, but it made it still simpler that she had very few, and that he satisfied them all without her asking him for anything. All except one. Unfortunately, this one wish was a very strong and frequent wish, and all Papa ever said when Elise expressed it was, “Why, no, Elise. I guess I don’t see my way to it.” It really did look as if Papa was cruel about Hermione. Elise knew that it was not the fault of her beautiful and enchanting elder sister that her marriage with a Roumanian Prince had turned out a disastrous failure. In spite of her wit, her beauty and her charm, nobody had ever breathed a word against Hermione. Her virtue was as undisturbed as her complexion. She was bereft of her husband (a comfort under the circumstances, but a comfort which could always be used as a grievance), and, by the wickedest of European laws, she was parted from her only child. She lived (Papa no doubt gave her a great deal of money to live on) the life of a broken-hearted invalid in the best apartments that the Ritz could offer. She wrote that she didn’t like Paris, but Papa wouldn’t have her come to stay at Mambles. When the air raids became troublesome in Paris, Hermione was moved with an extraordinary amount of care and the best attentions of the highest officials in France and England, with all her papers especially signed and eased of their usual restrictions, to London. Papa found two trained nurses for her and a house in one of the quietest of London squares, but he did not relax his inexplicable refusal to have Hermione at Mambles. “Why, no, Elise,” he repeated. “You can go up to see Hermione (if she isn’t too ill to speak, and I don’t understand that her illnesses take that form), as long as you won’t make her any deathbed promises. I should object to that. But I don’t want her down here. “You just tell her it’s a dull place and damp, unless you find she hankers after damp and wants it dull—then you tell her it’s lively and dry as a bone.