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 bars of the dining-room fire. “I’m simply useless here.”

Edward was a second cousin. To him the little house was the ideal home, just as Maisie was—well, not, perhaps, the ideal girl, but the only girl in the world, which comes to much the same thing. But he never told her so: he dared not risk losing the cousin’s place and missing for ever the lover’s.

So, in his anxiety lest she should know how much he cared, he scolded her a good deal. But he took her to picture galleries and to matinées, and softened her life in a hundred ways that she never noticed. He was only “Poor old Edward,” and he knew it.

“How can you?” he said. “Why, what on earth would Aunt do without you? Here, have this one—it’s a beauty.”

“I ought to have been taught a trade, like other poor girls,” she went on, waving away the roasted chestnut. “Lots of the girls I was at school with are earning as much as a pound a week now—typewriting or painting birthday cards, and some of them are in the Post Office—and I do nothing but drudge away at home. It’s too bad.”

Edward would have given a decent sum at that moment to be inspired with exactly the