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98 "I shall go up to the house and get tidy before lunch," she said.

Elizabeth waited till she was out of hearing.

"How long has this clandestine correspondence been going on?" she asked her sister. "There were four sides of writing. I saw them."

Aunt Cathie felt hotly about this.

"Then you've got no business to, Elizabeth," she said, "and I wonder at you. You demean yourself by looking over Lucia's letter."

"I consider it a providential circumstance that I did," said Elizabeth.

"Well, then, I'm not of your way of thinking," said Cathie. "If there's anything that we ought to know, Lucia will tell us. If she does not, it's not our business."

"I shall not rest till I find out the contents of that letter," said Elizabeth firmly. "You have no strength of character, Catherine; you leave everything to me."

"I certainly leave that sort of thing to you," said Cathie, "and I wish you'd leave it alone."

Elizabeth drew a vague diagram of curves and straight lines, signifying nothing, with the point of her sunshade in the sand.

"Lucia has no delicacy," she announced. "In our day, Catherine, if either of us had heard from a strange peer, we should instantly have taken the letter to our mother. At least I should, though I have my doubts about you in the light of this."

"But we never did hear from a strange peer," said Catherine.

"That is quite immaterial. I gather that you will make no efforts to find out what Lord Brayton writes to Lucia about?"

"Of course I will not. If Lucia thinks good, she will tell us."

"Catherine, you have neither strength of character nor sense of duty," said her sister. "Let us get back to lunch, though I am sure it is little appetite I bring to it. I have been much agitated. I should not wonder if this threw me back for a week."

What exactly Aunt Elizabeth was to be thrown back from was not completely clear, and Catherine forbore to ask. She herself was delightfully excited about Lucia's letter, and longed in a different spirit, but with even greater intensity than Elizabeth longed, to know more. Though she would not have dreamed of doing what Elizabeth had done and looked over the letter, she could not but be thrilled with the fact that there were four pages. "So it must be about something," she thought, knowing the difficulty of making letters that were about nothing extend to