"Really? Then you must explain it to me, and cope with it for me. I hope our Christmas dinner has come up to the dinner of Sarah's intentions. Have another pear; or some more nuts? I did not order crackers, because we are both grown up, and we should look so foolish in paper caps; and yet, if we had had them, we could not have resisted putting them on. Don't you know, at children's parties, the way in which grown-ups seize upon the most outré of the coloured head-gear, don them, in a moment of gay abandonment, and—forget them! I can remember now, the delight, after one of the Christmas parties in my childhood, of seeing Chappie go gravely in to say good-night to grandpapa, completely unconscious of a Glengarry bonnet, tilted waggishly on one side, or, on another occasion, of a tall peaked fool's cap, perched on her frizzled 'transformation'. Oh, to be a little child again, each Christmas-day! Yet here am I—twenty-eight! How old are you, Cousin David?... Twenty-nine? Well, I am glad you are not quite thirty. Being in another decade would have been like being in a cassock.... Why a cassock? How dense you are, my reverend cousin! My mildest jokes require explaining. Why because it would have removed you so far away, and I want you quite near this evening, not perched in a distant pulpit! You cannot really help me, unless you fully sympathise and understand. And I am in such sore straits, Cousin David, that I look upon myself as a drowning man—why do we always say 'drowning man' as if there never were any drowning women?—about to sink for the third time; and you as the rope, which constitutes my only hope of safety. Let us go to the drawing-room."

Chapter VII - The Touch of Power

*

As they passed into the drawing-room, David's eye fell on a grand piano, in black ebony case, to the left of the doorway.

"Oh!" said David, and stopped short.

"Does that tempt you?" asked Diana. "Yes; I might have known you were full of music. Your sufferings, over the performances of the Brambledene choir, were more patent than you realised."

David's fingers were working eagerly.

"I so rarely get the chance of a piano," he said. "Like chaperons, we don't have them in Central Africa. I went without all manner of things to be able to afford one in my rooms at college; but, since then—Is it a Bechstein, or what?"