to get her some flowers and offered to sit with her,
but this is one of her bad days, poor girl." He fell silent
for a minute and then added, wistfully, "I'm won-
dering if you would like to hear 'Ye Banks and Braes
o' Bonnie Doon'? It used to be your mother's favour-
ite air."

Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly
obliging old man, by some ironic contradiction of his
intentions his life had become a series of blunders
through which he endeavoured to add his share to the
general happiness. His soul was overflowing with
humanity, and he spent sleepless nights evolving inno-
cent pleasures for those about him, but his excess of
goodness invariably resulted in producing petty
annoyances if not serious inconveniences. So his
virtues had come to be regarded with timidity, and
there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to what
Uncle Percival was "doing" in his mind. The fear
of inopportune benefits was in its way as oppressive
as the dread of unmerited misfortune.

Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw her-
self into a chair on the other side of the tall bronze
lamp upon the writing table. On the stem of an
eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect
flower of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the
sombre old house had not succeeded in cultivating
in her the slightest resemblance to an artificial variety.
She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the orig-
inal product, and Uncle Percival never realised this
more hopelessly than in that unresponsive headshake
of dismissal. Laura could be kind, he knew, but she
was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted.

"Presently--not now," she said, "I want to talk

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