UNCLE Matthew Rouncivell was not of course so old as his relatives boasted that he was, but he was old enough to be considered incapable of lasting much longer and old enough to justify any member of the family in adding a few years to the correct total, which was seventy-six. He had been fifteen years younger than the wife of the Bishop of Clapham, and though he had scoffed at his sister for marrying a parson, he had to admit in the end that Andrew had made the most of a poor profession. Uncle Matthew's mean and acquisitive boyhood had been the consolation of his father's declining years, and he started life with a comfortable fortune notwithstanding what had been robbed from him as a dowry to marry off his sister. Their father, Samuel Rouncivell, had invested largely in property that seemed likely to put difficulties in the way of far-off municipal improvements, or as he preferred to put it, lay along the lines of future urban development. He and his son after him had a remarkable flair for buying up decrepit slums that would afterward turn out to be the only possible site for a new town hall or public library. And then the keen eye old Samuel had for the arteries of traffic! Why, it was as keen as an anatomist's for the arteries of the human body. In whatever direction tramlines or railroads desired to flow, there stood Samuel ready to apply his tourniquet, which was sometimes nothing more than one tumbledown cottage plastered with signs of ancient lights. This sense of direction was transmitted to Matthew, who when one of the big London termini had to be enlarged trebled his fortune at a stroke. Now, at seventy-six, he could not be worth less than fifteen thousand a year, and as he did not spend five hundred, every year he lived was making him wealthier. Long ago he had married a beautiful young woman who a few months later was killed in a riding accident. Since then he had spent a solitary and misanthropic life, grinding his tenants, amassing a quantity of unusual walking-sticks and bad modern pictures, and collecting what he called antiques. His only amusement was the malicious delight he took in leading the various groups of his relations to suppose one after another that he was contemplating them as his beneficiaries. Thin-lipped and beaky, he had a fat flabby back and pale flabby cheeks, and the skin of his neck was mottled and scaly as a snake's slough. He usually wore a frock-coat that resembled the green slime on London railings in wet weather; but when he dined out he took with him a black velvet smoking cap worked in arabesques of yellow silk and a pair of slippers made of leopard's fur to which moth had given a mangy appearance. He liked to dine early, and it was six o'clock of a fine evening in early May when he arrived at The Cedars, his frock-coat reinforced by a grey muffler long enough and thick enough to have kept a Zulu moderately warm at the North Pole. He did not seem in a good temper, and when Niko helped him to disengage himself from the muffler, he asked with a growl if the fool thought he was spinning a top. However, when he entered the dining-room and saw poor Sholto Grant's pictures all aglow in the rich horizontal sunlight, he cheered up for a moment, until a suspicion that his nephew Eneas was proposing to sell him the pictures intervened and spoilt his pleasure. He at once began to criticize and cheapen the pictures so ruthlessly that Jasmine could hardly keep back her tears. In Crispano's CafÉ at Sirene she had once heard a futurist painter criticizing her father's pictures, and she had been so angry that she had upset the coffee over him on her way out. To hear Uncle Matthew one might suppose that such bad pictures had never been painted since the world began; yet she could say nothing.

"I'm sorry you don't like them," said Aunt Cuckoo, "because Jasmine has brought them back for you all the way from Sirene."

"Eh? What's that?" demanded Uncle Matthew, twisting round on one of his sticks and thumping the floor with the other. "Who's Jasmine?"

"Jasmine is poor Sholto's daughter."

"What? Another?" the old gentleman growled.

"No, he only had one."

"I can't think why people want to have children at all," Uncle Matthew sniffed. Eneas congratulated his wife with a complacent glance on their reserve about Baby. "So you brought back these pictures for me, did you?" the old gentleman continued. "Humph! I did buy one of your father's pictures a long time ago, and I don't say it was bad, but he asked too much for it. And now if I accept these I shall have to buy frames for them," he concluded indignantly.

But the insistency of Sholto's pictures, the indubitable, the positive proclamation of their being what they were, the full value they gave of blue water, bright flowers, and rosy cheeks, softened the old gentleman's heart. They really did express for him his own taste in art, and inasmuch as they were a present he could not quite conceal his gratification.

"I hope you haven't gone and ordered a very extravagant dinner for me," he said gruffly to hide as far as possible the least amenity in his manner.

Aunt Cuckoo reassured him, and, the gong ringing at that moment, they moved toward the dining-room. Uncle Matthew disdained an arm, preferring to rely upon his two sticks.

"Wonderful how he bears himself for an old gentleman, isn't it?" whispered Uncle Eneas to Jasmine. "We're a long-lived family. There's no doubt about that." He was too anxious for the success of the evening to brag more particularly about his own athletic qualities.

The dinner consisted of various Eastern dishes, on all of which the old gentleman looked with an approving eye, because each dish gave the impression of being a hash of something unfinished the day before. The richness of their flavouring appealed to his palate, and the zest with which his nephew filled up his own plate had its effect upon his own appetite. Jasmine got into disgrace early in the meal by leaving half a plate of pilau untouched, but she was able to recover some of her lost ground by refusing wine.

"Good girl!" Uncle Matthew exclaimed, and turning to his nephew he asked why there was wine on the table when he knew that there was nothing of which he disapproved so much as wine. Eneas glared angrily at his wife. It was only since Father Maloney had been dining with them occasionally that wine had been seen at The Cedars. The offending decanter was removed, and everybody finished what water was left in his tumbler with an expression of critical enjoyment.

"Have you written about those rooms yet?" Uncle Matthew asked presently.

Eneas shook his head weightily. "The trouble is I shall have to stay in London until the end of July. I've been asked by the Foreign Office to do some work for them—expert work in Turkish which nobody else can do at present." Then he wavered. "But perhaps Cuckoo...."

His wife cut him short. "I shan't be able to get away until July," she said; but she went on roguishly: "So we thought that perhaps if you were very good, Uncle Matthew, we'd lend you Jasmine for a little while."

Eneas could not withhold a glance of admiration; he even resolved not to allude to the mistake over the wine when Uncle Matthew was gone. He admitted to himself that he should never have thought of suggesting that Jasmine was a loan, or of putting Uncle Matthew in the position of a little boy being given a treat.

"Lend me Jasmine?" the old gentleman repeated. "And what am I to do with Jasmine, pray?"

"She's invaluable," said Aunt Cuckoo, leaning across the dining-table and squeezing her niece's hand. "And I wouldn't lend her to anybody else but you. Everybody's clamouring for her."

Uncle Matthew looked at his great-niece with the expression that for many years he had been wont to accord to proffered bargains.

"You told us you wanted a change," Aunt Cuckoo persisted. "And as soon as you told us we made up our minds that whatever it cost us you should have Jasmine."

Throughout the evening Aunt Cuckoo made it appear that Jasmine really was indispensable, and by dint of never committing herself to anything without asking Jasmine if she agreed with her and of never formulating any plan without asking Jasmine first if she approved of it and of never wanting anything without asking Jasmine if she would fetch it for her, she really did manage to impress Uncle Matthew that by taking away Jasmine from The Cedars he would be robbing a nephew and niece. This was too keen a pleasure for the old gentleman to deny himself, and when he left that evening he went away with a solemn promise that Jasmine should be delivered to him at eleven o'clock the following morning.

"We don't usually let the carriage go out two days running," said Aunt Cuckoo in a final burst of abnegation, "but for dear Jasmine's sake we will."

"A very successful evening, my dear," Uncle Eneas observed when the visitor was gone.

"And that precious lamb upstairs never made a sound."

"The young rascal! He knew. He knew," the adoptive father idiotically chuckled.

Jasmine wondered what he was supposed to know—perhaps, she thought with a shade of malice, that he might one day inherit Uncle Matthew's fortune if Uncle Matthew died in ignorance of his existence. She could not bring herself to imagine that any money would be left to Lettice and Pamela. Ah, but there were others whom she had not yet seen, those six boy cousins at Silchester, and Uncle Alexander with his lunatic prince. Why had she ever consented to leave Sirene? Whichever way she looked in England there was nothing to be seen except an endless vista of servitude. Girls in books always struck out for themselves, but perhaps they were the only girls who were written about. There must be hundreds of others like herself who remained slaves. Not at all, they finally got married; they worked hard and....

"It's really a ghastly prospect," she exclaimed aloud.

"UscirÒ pazza! I'm like some cheap novel in a circulating library gradually getting more and more dog's-eared, more and more dirty and greasy, and all the time being passed on and on—oh! I can't stand it much longer...."

Jasmine did not set out to Muswell Hill with much hope in her heart. She felt as if she was being posted to Matthew Rouncivell, Esq., and the kisses of her uncle and aunt remained on her cheeks like postage stamps.

Rouncivell Lodge was a double-fronted, two-storied house which was built of brown brick in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, probably by some prosperous city merchant, as a country residence. It had remained what was practically a country residence until a few years ago, when old Matthew Rouncivell sacrificed the couple of acres of garden behind the house and built on the site large blocks of bright red flats, leaving no land to his own house except the shrubbery in front, which was divided into three segments by a semicircular drive; in the largest of these stood a Doric summer-house converted by Mr. Rouncivell into a smoking-room. The proximity of the flats and the amount of sky they cut off added to the gloom of the shrubbery, which was a mass of rank ivy and euonymus bushes, of American rhododendrons, lilacs that never flowered, privets, and Portuguese laurels. Moreover, although the flats were what the agent called high-class residential flats, the landlord, possibly with the vague notion of guarding what was left of the privacy he had himself destroyed, had had them planned to present to anybody entering the gates of Rouncivell Lodge their domestic windows, which, with dish-cloths drying on every sill, gave them the squalid appearance of tenement buildings.

The old gentleman himself, when, wearing his velvet smoking-jacket, his tasselled smoking-cap, and a pair of goloshes over his fur slippers, he visited the smoking-room to smoke his weekly cigar, found the flavour of the cigar was enhanced by calculating how much a year each window in sight brought him in. This meditation was so comforting that he used really to enjoy his smoke, although the cigars, which were of poor quality when he bought them, had not been improved by their storage in the damp Doric summer-house. However, he smoked them literally to the bitter end; this bitter end he used to stick upon a penknife, and even when each puff nearly blistered his tongue he still enjoyed it, because he had made a calculation that merely by the amount more of a cigar he smoked than anyone else he had gained on the whole year two complete cigars. He was always making calculations. He would even calculate how much each spine of the shark's backbone that was the only decoration of the walls of his smoking-room cost him. And as for the cost of Jasmine's food, he could have told you to a spoonful of soup.

The centre of Rouncivell Lodge was occupied by a very wide staircase lighted from above by a large skylight and bounded by walls the entire area of which was covered with a collection of astonishingly banal pictures. The visitor realized with a shock of knowledge that the pictures from the exhibition of the Royal Academy went every year to accommodation provided by staircases like this. The most rapid, the most inattentive glance at these pictures was enough to produce a sense of almost intolerable fatigue, because each picture was so obviously what it set out to be that the eye was not allowed a blink between a Sussex down, a Devonshire harbour, a Dorset pasture, and a London slum, and the amount of narrative compressed into the space was as if a dozen bad novelists had simultaneously read a dozen of their worst chapters. The massed effect was as confused and brilliant as a wall covered with varnished scraps. The brightness of the staircase and the gaudiness of the pictures were accentuated by the comparative gloom of the rooms on either side, particularly those at the back of the house, which from having been designed to look over a spacious garden were some of them now only six feet from the walls of the new flats. The still close atmosphere created by windows that were never opened from one year's end to the other was tainted by the odour of varnish and stale sunlight; the rooms on the ground floor smelt perpetually of half-past-two on Sunday afternoon, partly of clean linen, partly of gravy.

There were six bedrooms, all of them with large four-poster beds, and all of them haunted by that strange frigidity, that frigidity almost of death which is produced by the least superfluity of china. They were furnished in an eclectic style, but the china was kept strictly to its own kind; thus one bedroom would be red, blue, and gold with Crown Derby; another, and this the most attractive, rose and lavender with Lowestoft; and there was one nightmare of a room filled with black and rose SÈvres.

"I don't like the idea of your sleeping in any of these rooms," Mr. Rouncivell grumbled to Jasmine. She thought at first that he meant to suggest their discomfort, but he went on: "You'll have to be very careful not to break anything. Just because there are three toilet sets, it doesn't mean that you can break what you like. This china has taken me a long time to collect, and it has cost me a great deal of money, what's more. Look at that slop-pail. You dare use that slop-pail!"

"Couldn't I have a less valuable set in my room?" Jasmine suggested.

"Less valuable?" the old man echoed fiercely. "What do you mean by less valuable? Do you want me to provide you with china you can throw about the room?"

"Which bedroom do you use?" she asked to change the subject.

"Bedroom? Did you say bedroom? I don't sleep in a bedroom. I sleep in the bathroom."

He took her to the furthest door along the passage and showed her what she thought was the most depressing room she had ever seen in her life. It was such a small bathroom that having chosen it for a bedroom Uncle Matthew had actually to sleep in the bath itself, or rather on a box mattress which he had fixed on top of it. The window of the room, already sufficiently gloomy from looking out on the flats, was made still more gloomy by its panes being plastered with ferns and the faded plumage of tropical birds. A board was nailed to the sill on which was a brush with scarcely more bristles than Uncle Matthew had hairs, a comb with four teeth, and a safety razor. Safety razors had brought a peculiar pleasure into the old man's life, because since their introduction he had been able to calculate every morning how many less blades he used than anybody else would have used.

After seeing this room Jasmine began to be rather apprehensive where she should sleep; but with many admonitions she was finally awarded the Lowestoft room, which, if she had to live surrounded by china, was the ware she would have chosen. There was only one servant in the house, an elderly woman with a yellow face called Selina, to whom Uncle Matthew presented Jasmine with a solemnity that was accentuated by a din of multitudinous clocks striking noon all over the house with an accompaniment of cuckoos, chimes, and musical voluntaries.

"Twelve o'clock," Uncle Matthew announced.

"At least," said Jasmine. And then she blushed, because she had not meant to be anything more than anxious to please the old man by an assumption of cheerful interest. "I meant ... I was surprised to find it was so early."

"You'll be more surprised than that before you leave this house," said Selina bitterly. "You'll be more surprised than that. You'll have the surprise of your life. You'll be so surprised that you won't know whether you're on your head or your heels."

After this prophecy, the application of which Jasmine could not guess, Selina did not speak to the guest except in monosyllables, and she passed a dreary enough week in being shown Uncle Matthew's antiques and in trying to hold the balance between greediness and wastefulness at their sombre meals. At the end of the week he chose from his collection of walking-sticks a Jersey cabbage-stalk, which he offered to lend her for promenades about the shrubbery.

"You've taken his fancy," said Selina, grabbing her arm when Jasmine, cabbage-stalk in hand, was pretending to enjoy walking up and down the drive.

"I wish I could take yours," she replied.

"You have," said the housekeeper. "And you're going to have tea with me this blessed afternoon. It isn't the surprise I intended for you."

"But it's a very nice surprise," said Jasmine.

"It's a surprise to me. Which is God's way," she added more enigmatically than ever.

Selina belonged to one of those small religious sects which have done so much to solve, to their own satisfaction at any rate, the obscure problems of eschatology. Ceaseless meditation upon the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the human race were damned made Selina gloomy, for she was not naturally a misanthropist and took no pleasure in the thought. Sometimes, moreover, she had doubts even about her own salvation, and on such days the household suffered. Jasmine's arrival at Rouncivell Lodge induced her to proclaim her conviction that with no exception at all the whole of the human race was to be damned eternally. Gradually, however, she realized that in any case she could not hope to inherit the whole of Uncle Matthew's fortune, and she decided that the few years between Uncle Matthew's death and her own projection into eternal torment would be more pleasantly and more profitably passed with Jasmine than alone on what might be an inadequate pension. No sooner had she reached this conclusion than she heard a voice in the night telling her that she was saved; the following morning she cooked some cakes and invited Jasmine to tea with her in the kitchen, the character of which accounted, Jasmine felt, for the housekeeper's yellow complexion; the room was as warm and nearly as dark as the inside of an oven. A large American clock, which only had to be wound up annually, was ticking over the high black mantelpiece; crickets were clicking somewhere behind the range; a green Norwich canary was pecking at his seeds; the hostess was rustling the tea in a canister.

Selina came to the point at once, and postponing the discussion of Jasmine's chances in the eternal future asked her frankly how she proposed to provide for the temporal future.

"That's a question we're both entitled to ask, as you might say. Don't eat those cakes too fast, or you'll have indigestion. What I mean to say is Mr. Rouncivell's rich and you're not. You'll excuse the familiarity? As soon as I saw your box, I said to myself: 'She's not rich.' Well, that's nothing, is it? I'm not rich myself. But that doesn't say we shouldn't live in hope. And that doesn't mean that I'm not provided for in a manner of speaking. Well, I like your looks, and I don't mind telling you that a lady friend of mine in Catford has taken two rooms for my retirement when Mr. Rouncivell's earthly troubles are over; for I wouldn't have you think he's not going to have worse troubles in the next world. That's neither here nor there. He can't expect to keep me for ever, that's a sure thing. If I'm one of the elect, he must just lump it. Only as soon as I heard you was coming I said to myself: 'Now, don't take an instant dislike to her before you've seen her. Make friends and talk things over quietly in your own kitchen.' You're eating those cakes too fast. Oh yes, I know they're very light and eat theirselves in a manner of speaking, but you're eating them too fast. Wait a bit and you shall have a cup of tea before you eat another one. You help me and I'll help you. That's all there is to it. Yes, now you're choking, you see. Supposing Mr. Rouncivell was to leave you everything, you would take care, wouldn't you, that those two rooms of mine in Catford which my lady friend is occupying at present was nicely furnished with what you might call any little tit-bits I chose for myself? Now, there's the clock in the hall, for instance. I've been listening to that clock these twenty years, and I've a fancy I should like to go on listening to it until I die. The beds you can have. Well, I mean to say, I never really cared for sleeping in a four-post bed. Too human altogether, I'm bound to say. The posts, I mean."

Jasmine had made several attempts to interrupt this stream of conversation, and once she would have succeeded if Selina had not filled her mouth at the moment of speech with a small tart. At last, however, she managed to protest that she expected nothing from Uncle Matthew.

"And that's where you're quite right," said Selina. "Don't expect nothing, and you won't be disappointed. If I expected, I shouldn't be taking you into my confidence, as it were, like I am doing. But if you'll only do what I say and follow my advice, you can have it all. There's that Lettice and that Pamela coming down with their darling Uncle Matthew here and their darling Uncle Matthew there. But he sees through it. Oh yes, he sees through all of them, the same as anybody else might see through glass. He wants to leave his money to somebody who'll look after it and not go and spend it. All you've got to do is to scrimp and scrape and let him see as you're like himself. I suppose you think he paid for those cakes you're eating? Not at all. They're paid for out of my savings to show you I'm your friend. You help me and I'll help you; and you can't say that's going against the Gospel, can you? Do unto others as you would they should do unto you. So what you've got to do is keep on admiring the way I save money, and I won't let any chance go by of whispering in his ear that his money is safer with you than with any of them. All I ask for myself is a few tit-bits when the poor old gentleman's in the ground. He's got no religion; he hates dogs, he hates poor people, he hates hospitals, he hates public parks, he hates everything. So there you are. I've been very plain spoken with you, and you can't say the contrary; very plain spoken, I've been. I'm one of the elect, and I can afford to be plain spoken. It doesn't matter what I say or what I do, our loving heavenly Father's waiting for me at this very moment, because He told me so last night. So far as I can see at present, you're not one of the elect. I'm sorry for it, because I've taken a rare fancy to you. But if we don't meet, in the heavenly courts, we can be friends so long as we're on earth. Oh yes, it's all in the Gospel."

The housekeeper's frankness was not displeasing to Jasmine, although she was much amused at the idea of inheriting money from anybody. However, for the first month of her stay with Uncle Matthew she was, without realizing it, quite a success, because having no money to spend, she gave him the impression that she was of a saving disposition. It never entered his head that anybody could be actually without one halfpenny, and he applauded her disinclination to visit shops and theatres, her habit of walking to where she wanted to go rather than of riding on omnibuses, her transformation of a spring hat into a summer hat, as admirable economies.

"You're doing a treat," whispered Selina cunningly. "Last night I peeped through his keyhole, and he was reading his will."

It was a strange existence for a girl of nineteen, this life with Uncle Matthew, and there were moments when she really did have daydreams about inheriting a vast fortune and going back to Sirene. It was not so much the idea of the money as of the return to her beloved island which twined itself round her thoughts. There would be such delightful things to do. She would buy that villa her father had always talked about buying one day; she would buy up all the pictures of her father that she could find and have a permanent exhibition of them in a large studio; she would invite Lettice and Pamela to stay with her and make their visit much more pleasant than they had made hers; she would invite Aunt Cuckoo and Uncle Eneas to bring the baby to Sirene, and she would make their visit very pleasant; and, above all, she would always take care that no people ever had to leave Sirene just because they could not afford to go on living there. Oh yes, and then there was Cousin Edith. She would certainly make an allowance to her so that she need never again be snubbed by Aunt May. Poor Cousin Edith, how polite she would be if she did inherit all Uncle Matthew's money. She would be so sorry about the way she had behaved about Harry Vibart. Harry Vibart? What could she do for him? She would never be able to marry him if she were an heiress, because she would always be afraid that he only wanted to marry her for her money. What a pity he did not propose to her before she inherited. She would not accept him, of course, but if he did not marry anybody else, and if he asked her again when she was rich, why perhaps ... but what nonsense all this dreaming was! She ought to be ashamed of herself.

And then she would jump up from the chair in which she was sitting, jump up so abruptly that all the knick-knacks would rattle and clink, and taking her Jersey cabbage-stalk, she would wander up and down the drive and become interested by such dull little incidents. Far the most exciting thing that happened all that month was a white butterfly that went dancing past and seemed to be flying south; and once an errand boy tried to stand on his head in his empty basket just outside the gates of Rouncivell Lodge. But that was only moderately exciting. Sometimes Uncle Matthew would come and stump up and down beside her and tell her how much a square foot the wood of whatever walking-stick he was using that morning fetched. And then he would think that it was too cold to be out of doors, and she would have to go in with him and mount a crazy step-ladder to lift down some ornament that he wanted to move. Or else she would have to wind up all the twelve tunes in his musical box, an elaborate instrument with little drums, the parchment of which was illuminated with posies, as much unlike real drums as the tinkling music from old operas was unlike a real band. When all the tunes had been played, Uncle Matthew always told her to be careful how she closed the lid, because the case was worth a lot of money and the tunes had been favourites of his wife.

That young wife of Uncle Matthew who died so long ago! It was difficult to think of her as his wife. Her portrait, in a full-skirted riding habit and wearing a hat such as only undertakers and mutes wear nowadays, hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, and Uncle Matthew used to talk about her as Clara, which made it seem all the more absurd to think that were she alive now Lady Grant would be calling her Aunt Clara. Jasmine had never disliked Uncle Matthew, and his devotion to the memory of his dead wife kindled the beginnings in her of a genuine affection. She divined now why he slept in that bleak uncomfortable bathroom, divined that it was due to a sentimental horror of occupying any room that contained relics of her too intimate to be spoken of. Jasmine used to ponder the old trunks, locked and strapped and full no doubt of mouldering clothes, that stood in every bedroom except her own. And even in her own bedroom the chests of drawers had both of them two locked drawers, containing who should say now what souvenirs of girlhood? Jasmine asked the housekeeper about Clara; but Selina knew no more than herself.

"I've never caught so much as a tiny glimpse of anything," she said. "And of course she was dead almost before I was born, though not before I was thought of, because my Pa was set on having a little girl of his own a considerable number of years before he actually did. Yes, Mr. Rouncivell cherishes her memory very dearly, and if ever he unlocks any of her boxes or drawers, he always takes care to bolt himself in first. In the room that is, of course. She was well-born too. Oh yes, an undoubted lady—the only daughter of an esquire."

One day Uncle Matthew took from the middle of his walking-sticks a slim malacca cane, the silver handle of which was cut to represent a mailed hand grasping a pistol.

"Loaded with lead," he observed, "just like a real pistol. That was Clara's favourite stick, and it's stood in this stand ever since she had it first. If you like...."

But he thought better of his offer and recommended Jasmine to look well after her Jersey cabbage-stalk. Jasmine liked to think that the unpleasant side of Uncle Matthew had not been developed until Clara's death. She tried to get accustomed to his meanness, making all sorts of excuses for it, and sometimes she actually encouraged him in it, as one humours an invalid's petulance and selfishness. She never felt nearly so much of a poor relation with him as with the others, and it was a satisfaction to feel that he regarded all of them as every bit as much poor relations as herself. Well, time was passing: already people were writing less frequently from Sirene. The city sunlight glittered upon the dusty leaves of the shrubs; Selina was a perpetual diversion; Jasmine was as happy as a Java sparrow in a cage, and almost as happy as the sparrows on the roof of Rouncivell Lodge. As for Uncle Matthew, he became less grumpy every day.

"Which means you suit him," said Selina. "You suit him the same as I suit him. Yes, in a manner of speaking, I fit that man like a glove."

Uncle Matthew had other reasons for supposing that in Jasmine he had discovered a treasure, for no sooner had the information that she was staying with him gone the round of her relatives than she received pressing invitations to come and stay with them as soon as dear Uncle Matthew could spare her. Perhaps Aunt Cuckoo, who had always been considered the most foolish of the family, had proved herself the wisest. The more the others wrote to ask Jasmine to stay with them, the more Uncle Matthew expressed himself content with her company, and the more Selina, with knowing looks and headshakes, implied her success.

"You'll be his heir, you'll be his heir, you'll be his heir!" she breathed exultingly. "And I've written to Mrs. Vokins she can rent the kitchen an extra two days a week as from per now. What did he do yesterday? Sent me out for a bottle of indelible ink. Indelible ink is only used for two things—wills and washing. Oh, there's not a doubt about it."

The yellow-faced housekeeper was so confident of success that when Lady Grant visited Rouncivell Lodge a few days later she alarmed her by open references to Jasmine's good fortune. Lady Grant hurried home and told Lettice and Pamela that, whatever their engagements during the crowded end of June, they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the affection they owed Uncle Matthew. The poor old gentleman was in his dotage; he was on the edge of the grave; he was being got at by that odious housekeeper and Jasmine.

"After all our kindness," Lady Grant lamented. "It does seem a little hard that she should turn the poor old dear against us. It's a crime."

"It's worse than a crime," declared Cousin Edith fervidly, "it's a——" But she could not think of anything worse than a crime except the sin against the Holy Ghost, and fond though she was of Cousin May, she did not think that Jasmine's behaviour was that—no, not quite that ... but worse than a crime.... "it's an unnatural sin," she triumphantly concluded after a little longer reflection.

"Don't be ridiculous!" This was from Sir Hector.

"Lettice and Pamela must go and stay with him," their mother decided. "Now please, dear children, don't look so disagreeable."

Lady Grant sat down at once and wrote to propose the visit. Next morning Uncle Matthew tossed the letter across the breakfast table to Jasmine.

"Oh, I hope you won't send me away," Jasmine begged. She was not perhaps actually enjoying herself at Rouncivell Lodge, but she greatly preferred walking about the shrubbery with her Jersey cabbage-stalk to walking round the Chamber of Horrors with Cousin Edith, which had been the last dissipation provided for her at Harley Street.

Therefore, when Uncle Matthew told her to write and say he could not have either Lettice or Pamela, she was overjoyed to do so. It did not strike her that it was a good opportunity to score off the Hector Grants, and she wrote so simply that her letter gave the impression of a security that irritated her relations much more than an attempt on her side to be clever.

"She's perfectly sure of herself," Lady Grant gasped. "She's wormed herself in."

"I always thought she was deeper than she pretended," Cousin Edith said with a shake of her head. "Do you remember, May, I said to you once: 'Still waters run deep'? Only of course she wasn't still. She was never still really. She was always jumping up and...."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Edith, don't babble on like that!" Sir Hector interrupted. "Eighty pounds for these robes, my dear. That's a nice sum to pay for a morning's masquerade."

"Little beast," said Pamela loudly. "I detested her from the first. By the way, I saw the Vibart youth at the Grave-Smiths' dance last night. I didn't say anything about it at the time, because I was afraid that Lettice might be upset."

"Me upset?" Lettice exclaimed angrily. "Why should I have been upset?"

"Now, please, darlings, don't quarrel," their mother begged. "This is not the moment to quarrel among ourselves."

"I say, I've got rather a notion," Pamela announced. "Why shouldn't we ask the Vibart youth here and tell him where dear Cousin Jasmine is to be found? That would annoy Uncle Matthew."

"What would annoy Uncle Matthew?" asked Lettice scornfully.

"Sorry you still can't bear the thought of your beloved's treachery," said Pamela with a malicious affectation of sympathy. "But if you could calm your beating heart for the sake of the family, you'd see what I meant."

"If Pamela thinks she can say what she likes to me just because...."

"Now hush, darling. Don't lose your temper, my pet. I see what Pamela means," interposed Lady Grant soothingly.

"You always take Pamela's side."

"Now, my darling, I must entreat you not to argue so absurdly."

"I should have thought it would have been obvious to the meanest intelligence," said Pamela with lofty sarcasm.

"Oh, would you, cleversticks?" her sister sneered.

"Obvious to anybody that if the Vibart youth hangs round Uncle Matthew's, Uncle Matthew will think twice of being so fond of our sweet cousin."

"Pamela, you're a genius," her mother declared proudly.

"Oh, she is, she is!" cried Cousin Edith, clapping her hands with excitement, for the scheme appealed to the innate procuress within her. "I should never have thought of anything half as clever. She's a...."

"Edith," her own rich cousin interposed, "I wish you wouldn't be quite so enthusiastic."

"I'm so sorry," Edith murmured humbly. "Shall I go and give Spottles his bath? Poor old boy, he's been rolling again, Cook says." And by the way in which she washed her own hands as she went out of the room Cousin Edith managed to suggest with suitable regret that she too had been rolling.

Within three days of this conversation Harry Vibart called on Jasmine at Rouncivell Lodge.

"Look here," he said reproachfully, "why didn't you ever write?"

"You never wrote to me." Jasmine tried to be cold and dignified, but she was so glad to see him again that it was not a successful attempt.

"I wrote you six letters."

"I never got them. I expect my aunt wouldn't allow them to be forwarded."

Vibart was sure that Jasmine was misjudging her. No one could have been more anxious to help him find Jasmine. Why, she had taken the trouble to write to Mrs. Grave-Smith for his address, had asked him to lunch and then volunteered Jasmine's address, and, what is more, advised him to go and call on her.

The Italian half of Jasmine was capable of being suspicious; it warned her that people like Aunt May did not so abruptly change their point of view. Why should she have sent him here? Why?... Why?... It must be that Lettice and Pamela had a chance of being married at last and that in a spasm of generosity she wished to help her niece ... or was it that she was afraid of having her on her hands, and hoped to palm her off on Harry Vibart? Such an idea froze her, and the young man, taken aback by her change of expression, asked what was the matter.

"I'm afraid you must have found it a very long way up to Muswell Hill," she said stiffly.

"Longish. Longish," he agreed. "But I took a taxi."

At this moment the window of the room in which they were sitting was darkened by a shadow, and there was Uncle Matthew with his face pressed against the pane and wearing an expression of malevolence, ferocity, and alarm. When they looked up, he waved his sticks above his head and snarled at them.

"It's a lunatic," exclaimed Harry Vibart.

"No, no, it's my uncle."

"I say, I'm awfully sorry. Perhaps he's ill."

Uncle Matthew was still waving his sticks so oddly and making such strange faces that Jasmine was alarmed and ran out to see what was upsetting him.

"Are you ill?" she asked.

"Ill? Ill? No. But I shall be ill in a moment. Listen!"

From the direction of the gates of Rouncivell Lodge the engine of a taxi throbbed upon the warm June air.

"He thinks it's an aeroplane," Vibart whispered. "Poor old chap, he's probably afraid it's going to fall on the house. Old people who haven't seen many of them do often get worried like that. It's all right, sir," he added in a louder voice, "it's only my taxi running up the twopences."

"Take it away," the old gentleman screamed. "Take it away, and take yourself away with it. Who are you? What do you mean by coming here and visiting my niece and keeping a taxi buzzing outside the gate? Do you realize that it's costing a penny a minute? Take it away!"

Harry looked at Jasmine, and she signed to him that it would be right to humour her uncle. She really was afraid that he was going to have a fit.

"Perhaps I may call another day?" the young man suggested in a despondent tone of voice.

"Certainly not. You'll be driving up next in a golden coach. If you want to squander your money, squander it some other way."

It was useless to argue with the infuriated old gentleman, and Vibart took himself off.

"That's the last I shall see of him," thought Jasmine, turning sadly to follow her uncle into the house. Later on, however, when Uncle Matthew had recovered from the shock to his parsimony, he enquired who her visitor was, and she thought that she was able to reassure him.

"Well," said the old gentleman, "perhaps I was a little hasty. Yes, I think I was. Does he smoke?"

"Not cigars," said Jasmine quickly. "At least I've never seen him smoking a cigar."

"He can come and see you twice a week. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And then perhaps later on we'll ask him to lunch. But don't count on that. And now come and sit with me in the smoking-room. Because I must smoke a cigar to calm my nerves after that shock."

They passed out into the hall, and on his way through Uncle Matthew cast a glance, as his custom was, at the numerous walking-sticks.

"Whose is this?" he asked, picking a malacca from the stand. "H. V." he read. "This is your friend's. You see, my dear, he's careless through and through. I never left a walking-stick in somebody else's house. Never in all my life."

"I think you made him rather nervous," Jasmine explained apologetically. But the old gentleman paid no attention: he was searching for something he missed.

"Where is it?"

"Where's what?"

"Clara's silver-handled cane."

"I don't see it," Jasmine stammered apprehensively.

"It's gone. That villain must have stolen it."

"If Mr. Vibart has taken one of your sticks, Uncle Matthew, he must have done so by mistake."

"The young scoundrel! The young blackguard!" He became incoherent with rage.

"But, Uncle Matthew, if he has taken one of your sticks he'll bring it back."

"Hers! Hers!" the old gentleman was gasping.

"Oh, dear Uncle Matthew, I'm so dreadfully sorry."

"My poor little wife's! He's taken my poor little wife's silver-handled cane. And she was so fond of it. Her favourite. The ruffian! The—the—tramp! He might have taken any other but that. Oh dear! Oh damn! Why do you bring these people here, you abominable girl?"

That afternoon Jasmine arrived in Harley Street, and had to explain that Uncle Matthew would not have her to stay with him any longer. The Hector Grants welcomed her with something like friendliness, but the next day, when Vibart brought back the missing stick, it was Pamela who claimed the privilege of returning it to Uncle Matthew, and a few days later it was thought advisable for Jasmine to pay her promised visit to Aunt Ellen and Uncle Arnold at Silchester.