With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off trimming a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably. "It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds," Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window. Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was "tramps." "In that case," she said with decision, "it is a matter for the police." The smile in Prudence's eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda's downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarrassment which follows upon duplicity. Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele. "I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning," he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his buttons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. "I hope Morgan won't send a man like that again." "Edward Morgan usually comes himself," Mr Graynor observed. "But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble." "Well, of course," said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, "he is getting old." Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty. "Don't be absurd," interposed Miss Agatha sharply. "Mr Morgan is in the prime of life." Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence's existence, was compelled to let the remark pass unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appetite, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the scrappy conversation to which she paid no attention.