“It might be—­if there were more of it,” said Lady Gertrude icily.  She had not failed to notice earlier that Nan was wearing the abbreviated skirt of the moment—­though in no way an exaggerated form of it—­revealing delectable shoes and cobwebby stockings which seemed to cry out a gay defiance to the plain and serviceable footgear which she herself affected.

“It does look just a tiny bit daring—­in the country,” murmured Isobel deprecatingly.  “You see, we’re used to such quiet fashions here.”

“I don’t think anything can be much quieter than black,” replied Nan evenly.

There for the moment the matter rested, but the next day Roger had asked her, rather diffidently, if she couldn’t find something plainer to wear in an evening.

“I thought you liked the dress,” she countered.

“Well—­yes.  But—­”

“But your mother has been talking t0 you about it?  Is that it?”

Roger nodded.

“Even Isobel thought it a little outre for country wear,” he said eagerly, making matters worse instead of better, in the blundering way a man generally contrives to do when he tries to settle a feminine difference of opinion.

Nan’s foot tapped the floor impatiently and a spark of anger lit itself in her eyes.

“I don’t think my choice of clothes has anything to do with Miss Carson,” she answered sharply.

“No, sweetheart, of course it hasn’t, really.  But I know you’d like to please my mother—­and she’s not used to these new styles, you see.”

He stumbled on awkwardly, then drew her into his arms and kissed her.

“To please me—­wear something else,” he said.  Although unformulated even to himself, Roger’s creed was of the old school.  He quite honestly believed that a woman’s chief object in life was to please her male belongings, and it seemed to him a perfectly good arrangement.

Not to please him, but because she was genuinely anxious to win Lady Gertrude’s liking, Nan yielded.  Perhaps if she conceded this particular point it would pave the way towards a better understanding.

“Very well,” she said, smiling.  “That especial frock shan’t appear again while I’m down here.  But it’s a duck of a frock, really, Roger!”—­with a feminine sigh of regret.

She was to find, however, as time went on, that there were very many other points over which she would have to accept Lady Gertrude’s rulings.  Punctuality at meals was regarded at Trenby Hall as one of the laws of the Medes and Persians, and Nan, accustomed to the liberty generally accorded a musician in such matters, failed on more than one occasion to appear at lunch with the promptness expected of her.

In the West Parlour—–­a sitting-room which Lady Gertrude herself never used—­there was a fairly good piano, and here Nan frequently found refuge, playing her heart out in the welcome solitude the room afforded.  Inevitably she would forget the time, remaining entirely oblivious of such mundane things as meals.  Then she would be sharply recalled to the fact that she had committed an unforgivable sin by receiving a stately message from Lady Gertrude to the effect that they were waiting lunch for her.