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 her announcement. She was not to be hurried even by the expression which Aunt Cassie's face inevitably assumed at the mention of Horace Pentland—the expression of one who finds himself in the vicinity of a bad smell and is unable to escape.

At last, after lighting a cigarette and moving her chair out of the sun, Sabine announced in a flat voice, "Cousin Horace has left everything he possesses to me."

A look of passionate relief swept Aunt Cassie's face, a look which said, "Pooh! Pooh! Is that all?" She laughed—it was almost a titter, colored by mockery—and said, "Is that all? I imagine it doesn't make you a great heiress."

("Aunt Cassie," thought Olivia, "ought not to have given Sabine such an opportunity; she has said just what Sabine wanted her to say.")

Sabine answered her: "But you're wrong there, Aunt Cassie. It's not money that he's left, but furniture . . . furniture and bibelots . . . and it's a wonderful collection. I've seen it myself when I visited him at Mentone."

"You ought never to have gone. . . . You certainly have lost all moral sense, Sabine. You've forgotten all that I taught you as a little girl."

Sabine ignored her. "You see, he worshiped such things, and he spent twenty years of his life collecting them."

"It seems improbable that they could be worth much . . . with as little money as Horace Pentland had . . . only what we let him have to live on."

Sabine smiled again, sardonically, perhaps because the tilt with Aunt Cassie proved so successful. "You're wrong again, Aunt Cassie. . . . They're worth a great deal . . . far more than he paid for them, because there are things in his collection which you couldn't buy elsewhere for any amount of money. He took to trading pieces off until his collection became nearly perfect." She paused for a moment, allowing