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To-night again and again she caught that look of shy, almost diffident friendliness. There were more young people than she had expected, girls with whom she felt she could establish very pleasant relationships, but for the most part her new uncles, aunts, and cousins were elderly and, as Rosalind was surely somewhere confidently asserting, "too established for words."

No one was difficult to talk to. They evidently had no desire that you should be clever; Janet did not feel, as always with Rosalind's set, that she was two sentences behind and that everyone was aware of it.

One fact gradually emerged from the tangled confusion of words—her great fortune, they all felt, in having Wintersmoon for her home. Wintersmoon was the house in all England. What a tragedy that in these monstrous days of impossible taxes some of it must be closed, but perhaps, as times were better and we left the horrible war behind us, they would be able to throw it all open again. Wintersmoon ... Wintersmoon ... Wintersmoon ... with its history and stories and tradition and colour, with its great Oak and lovely Minstrels' Gallery and Queen Elizabeth's bed and the wing where Charles I. stayed for a whole fortnight before Edgehill, its three ghosts, and its Spanish Walk. She must indeed be too gloriously happy in the prospect of such a home!