Rhoda smiled and blushed. Nothing, certainly, could be more engaging than Lady Sarah’s manner, nothing more flattering than her words. But still Rhoda could not but feel all the while that there was some reason for this surprising and even uncalled for graciousness. From all she had heard, Sir Robert’s wife, though a very charming and beautiful woman, was far from being always sympathetic or amiable in her own house, and there seemed to be no particular reason why she should be so very nice. Rhoda, while rather ashamed of her misgivings, felt them quite strongly. “I suppose you scarcely recognised the old place?” went on Lady Sarah, still in the same tone of smiling good humour, quite forgetting the small boy in his bed, who was lying with his eyes fixed upon Rhoda, waiting for the ladies to come back to him. “It is very much changed,” said the girl. Lady Sarah laughed. “Inside and out I’ve effected marvellous transformations, I flatter myself. You know my family has suffered horribly from want of money, as all decent families do now-a-days. If this horrid Budget with its Land clauses passes, why, Papa and Mama will simply have to pack a small handbag with necessaries, such as hair-dye and face powder, and trudge off to the nearest workhouse.” Rhoda laughed. But Lady Sarah affected to be shocked at her levity. “Oh, it’s quite true, indeed,” she said. “However, that will explain to you how I felt when I got married and found myself at last with an occasional eighteenpence of my own. I went mad, mad, I really did. I made up my mind to have a house I could live in comfortably, and I was generous enough to let my husband have something he liked too. Do you know, before he married me, fond as he was of his pictures and china and things, it had never occurred to him to build a place to put them in? But I changed all that. I practically rebuilt the house, as you see; let in a little light and air into the musty corners; let him have a gallery which has become the joy of his heart. And--well, I didn’t forget myself either, while I was about it.” And she laughed the merry, careless laugh of a happy child. It was all put on, but so well that Rhoda was fascinated, sure as she could not but feel that there was some reason for this lavish expenditure of Lady Sarah’s fascinations upon a person so obscure as herself. “Mama!” piped the small voice from the bed. “Oh! Caryl! I’d forgotten him.” Lady Sarah took Rhoda by the hand, and brought her to the bed, and they both kissed the boy before they left him. He was as much surprised, Rhoda could not but feel, as she herself was, at the warmth of his mother’s manner to the newcomer in the household. Lady Sarah turned with a most graceful movement to the girl as they went out of the room.