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Rh and the rest of the series lacked it, too: for once he had done something in the doing of which he had forgotten himself. It was by no means a work of genius, for Georgie was not possessed of one grain of that, and the talent it displayed was by no means of a high order, but it had something of the naturalness of a flower that grew from the earth which nourished it.

On the last day of the year he was putting a few final touches to it, little high reflected lights on the black keys, little blacknesses of shadow in the moulding of the panel behind his hand. He had finished with her altogether, and now she sat in the window-seat, looking out, and playing with the blind-tassel. He had been so much absorbed in his work that he had scarcely noticed that she had been rather unusually silent.

“I’ve got a piece of news for you,” she said at length.

Georgie held his breath, as he drew a very thin line of body-colour along the edge of Ab.

“No! What is it?” he said. “Is it about the Princess?”

Olga seemed to hail this as a diversion.

“Ah, let’s talk about that for a minute,” she said. “What you ought to have done was to order another copy of ‘Todd’s News’ at once.”

“I know I ought, but I couldn’t get one when I thought of it afterwards. That was tarsome. But I feel sure there was something about her in it.”

“And you can’t get anything out of the Quantocks?”

“No, though I’ve laid plenty of traps for them. There’s an understanding between them now.