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about anything again, except arranging the flowers? How they must love him.’
    ‘They do,’ said Eugenia.
‘Heil Hitler!
Cousin Poppy St Julien, you must be enrolled as a Union Jackshirt at once. It costs ninepence a month, the Union Jack shirt is five shillings, and sixpence for the little emblem. Here we are.’
    Vivian Jackson and the Reichshund followed them up the twisted marble staircase, but when they had reached the top a word from Eugenia made them turn round and trot down it again. ‘Stay there,’ she said, over her shoulder, and ushered Poppy and Jasper into a huge domed room, so blue that it might have been a pool in some Mediterranean lagoon, and they fishes swimming in it.
    Across its azure immensity sat Lady Chalford waiting to dispense tea out of a golden tea-pot of exquisite design. She looked rather like Whistler’s portrait of his mother.

6
    If Lady Chalford was like a relic from a forgotten age, a museum-piece of great antiquity, it was not because her years were heavy so much as that her speech, her dress, and her outlook, had remained unaltered since before the War. Nineteen fourteen had marked the evening of her days when she should have been yet in her prime.
    The world calamity, however, had little or nothing to do with this decline, having been far eclipsed in her eyes by the disastrous marriage made by her only son; while to her, his death in 1920 from wounds received the day before the Armistice, was a lesser disaster than the fact of his divorce. It made no difference in the eyes of his parents that Lord Malmains had divorced his wife; her shame was his, and theirs, and furthermore the heiress to their lands and titles had the tainted blood of an adulteress in her veins. No such thing had ever happened before in the Malmains family, throughout history no shadow of disgrace had ever fallen upon the proud ambitious heads whose likenesses now stared down from pink brocade walls in Lord Chalford’s portrait gallery.
    Since the disaster Lady Chalford had never set foot outside her park gates. Lord Chalford, protected by an armour of total deafness, had, until recently laid low by a stroke, performed his duties as a legislator most punctiliously, but when in London he had always stayed at his club, the almost unearthly beauties of Malmains Palace, in Cheyne Walk, having now been hidden from all human eyes, except those of the caretaker, for sixteen long years.
    Eugenia had been handed over to her grandparents at the age of three, after her father’s death. They could never forgive her for what her mother had been, and regarded the poor child with suspicion, which became tempered, however, as she grew older with asort of sorrowful affection. Luckily, her appearance made things easier for them, Malmains women were all large blonde goddesses, and her looks bore no relation to those of their sinful daughter-in-law. Now that she had reached the age of seventeen she presented a problem with which poor Lady Chalford wrestled miserably. What was to be done with her? Of no use to give her a London season, how should any respectable mother invite, any decent young man propose, to the Child of Scandal. (Lady Chalford, it will be observed, was a trifle pessimistic in her estimate of modern London Society’s attitude towards heiresses.) And yet Eugenia must marry, Chalford House and the barony of Malmains which she would in due course inherit from her grandfather must have an heir.
    Haunted night and day by these problems, Lady Chalford had been constrained to question Eugenia with regard to the two young strangers whom she had so indiscreetly spoken to on the village green. Had they been suitable friends for the child they would surely have waited to be presented before addressing a young lady, yet, might it be that they had been brought by the hand of a far-seeing Providence to Chalford? She was disposed to consider that such had been the case when she learnt that one of them was Mr Jasper Aspect,