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better close the wire doors on your window, or your room will be full of flying beasts.” Crossing the room as she spoke she pulled-to the netted frames. “We haven’t many mosquitoes up here, thank goodness”

She moved restlessly about the room for a moment.

“Are these your photographs?”

“Yes, that’s my father.”

“And this?”

“My stepmother.”

“Why did they allow you to come out here by yourself? You’re only a baby.”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“You look about seventeen—I’d never have engaged you if I’d known you were so young. That Educational Bureau, or whatever they call themselves, in Wellington, didn’t mention your age.”

“Do you mean you’re not—not satisfied?”

Mrs. Holmes shrugged.

“If you can manage the children it’ll be all right I suppose—and they seem to have taken a fancy to you.”

She turned, and suddenly her voice lost its lazy drawl, and was shaken and impatient, as it had been at dinner when she spoke of Rodney Marsh.

“If I sent you away I suppose kind friends would say that I was jealous of you because you’re so young and pretty.”

For a moment Ann was taken aback; then she answered quite simply:

“Why should you be jealous when you look...so...so beautiful yourself?”

A quick light sprang into Mrs. Holmes’s dark eyes.

“Do you mean that? Yes”—she said slowly, answering her own question—“you do. Your eyes are truth-