“Don’t scold, Penny.”  Nan brought the influence of a pair of appealing blue eyes to bear on the matter.  “I really mean to begin work—­soon.”

“When?” demanded the other searchingly.

Nan’s charming mouth, with its short, curved upper lip, widened into a smile of friendly mockery.

“You don’t expect me to supply you with the exact day and hour, do you?  Don’t be so fearfully precise, Penny!  I can’t run myself on railway time-table lines.  You need never hope for it.”

“I don’t”—­shortly.  Adding, with a twinkle:  “Even I’m not quite such an optimist as that!”

As she spoke, Penelope laid down her sewing and stretched cramped arms above her head.

“At this point,” she observed, “the House adjourned for tea.  Nan, it’s your week for domesticity.  Go and make tea.”

Nan scrambled up from the hearthrug obediently and disappeared into the kitchen regions, while Penelope, curling herself up on a cushion in front of the fire, sat musing.

For nearly six years now she and Nan had shared the flat they were living in.  When they had first joined forces, Nan had been at the beginning of her career as a pianist and was still studying, while Penelope, her senior by five years, had already been before the public as a singer for some considerable time.  With the outbreak of the war, they had both thrown themselves heartily into war work of various kinds, reserving only a certain portion of their time for professional purposes.  The double work had proved a considerable strain on each of them, and now that the war was past it seemed as though Nan, at least, were incapable of getting a fresh grip on things.

Luckily—­or, from some points of view, unluckily—­she was the recipient of an allowance of three hundred a year from a wealthy and benevolent uncle.  Without this, the two girls might have found it difficult to weather the profitless intervals which punctuated their professional engagements.  But with this addition to their income they rubbed along pretty well, and contrived to find a fair amount of amusement in life through the medium of their many friends in London.

Penelope, the elder of the two by five years, was the daughter of a country rector, long since dead.  She had known the significance of the words “small means” all her life, and managed the financial affairs of the little menage in Edenhall Mansions with creditable success.  Whereas Nan Davenant, flung at her parents’ death from the shelter of a home where wealth and reckless expenditure had prevailed, knew less than nothing of the elaborate art of cutting one’s coat according to the cloth.  Nor could she ever be brought to understand that there are only twenty shillings in a pound—­and that at the present moment even twenty shillings were worth considerably less than they appeared to be.

There are certain people in the world who seem cast for the part of onlooker.  Of these Penelope was one.  Evenly her life had slipped along with its measure of work and play, its quiet family loves and losses, entirely devoid of the alarums and excursions of which Fate shapes the lives of some.  Hence she had developed the talent of the looker-on.