Sheila Pat rose suddenly and left the room. She went into her bedroom.. It was a bright, cold day with a brilliant sun sparkling on a fast-disappearing frost. But Sheila Pat donned a dark blue raincoat. She looked down with satisfaction on the neat little ankles and feet that were all that emerged from that end. From the other end, above an intensely sporting turned-up collar, her small face looked out with a weighty seriousness. She put on a dark blue peaked sort of cap, also rain proof, slipped downstairs, and left the house. With her hands in big pockets, she walked staidly down the road, a quaint little exceedingly tailorish figure. She stopped to accost a grey cob in a milkman’s cart, and on the milkman’s appearing from a house fell into conversation with him. Suddenly she broke out, appealingly young and eager in spite of her coat:— "Might I—oh, _please_ might I get in and hold the reins while you’re in the houses?" He appeared to hesitate. "It—" a little choke jostled the words—"it’s weeks and weeks since I’ve held the reins!" The milkman glanced dubiously down at the very small Atom, then at his quiet old cob, and assented. As he politely helped her in he felt the little tremor that shook her, but he did not understand it. He smiled surprisedly at the workmanlike way in which she gathered up the reins. He nodded kindly into the suddenly joyous face uplifted to his. Sheila Pat let out a great big breath and clucked softly to the cob. "Plenty of work in him yet," she observed conversationally. "Pretty shrewd, too," with a proud little laugh as the cob stopped outside a house. "He knows the houses I supply as well as I do, miss." On his rejoining her, "Any special fad?" she asked. "Well, he’s steady-going as a rule, miss,—don’t mind motors, or trains, or stone-crushers a bit,—but it’s a funny thing he can’t stand wheelbarrers! Shies at ’em quite skittish." Sheila Pat listened with absorbed interest. The milkman came to the last house on his list, and she drove him in style to the dairy. The conversation on the way was strictly horsey. As they drew up she mentioned where she was going. "Mr. Yovil? Oh, we supply him. I’ll take you there, miss; it’s close by." So it came about that Mr. Mark Yovil, looking forth from his study window, beheld his milkman driven to his gate by a very small and very dignified driver, who, after bidding the cob a lingering and loving farewell, shook hands with the milkman, and entered Mr. Yovil’s gate. A few minutes later a rigidly grave maid announced: "Miss Sheila Patricia Kathleen O’Brien," and the Atom walked in. "How-do-you-do? I am the sister of Denis O’Brien." Mr. Yovil took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief, then he fixed them on the brown and bumpy bridge of his nose, and regarded her through them.