And now poor Josephine and her kittens were to be banished to the old stable, and to-morrow driven back ignominiously to Epsom, all because of that tiresome, hateful Mrs. Crofton!

There was no one in the kitchen, and it did not look as tidy as it generally looked; though the luncheon things had been washed up, they had not been put away.

Mother and son walked on into the scullery to find Betty there, boiling some water over a spirit lamp.  “Betty?  How very delightful you look!” her step-mother exclaimed.  “Just like an old picture, child!  Wherever did you get that charming motor-bonnet?”

And then Timmy chipped in:  “I thought of it,” he said triumphantly; “it was my idea, Mum, but Godfrey paid for it.  He said he hadn’t given Betty a proper present yet, so he had to pay for it, and, and—­”

Janet was just a little surprised.  She was very old-fashioned in some ways, and she had brought up her step-daughters to be, as regarded money matters at any rate, as old-fashioned as herself.  It seemed to her very strange that Betty had allowed Godfrey Radmore to give her such a present as a hat!  Yet another thing puzzled her.  She had understood that the three of them were going off some way into Sussex to look at a house, but they had evidently been up to London.  Motor bonnets don’t grow on country hedges.

“Where’s the cat?” she asked, looking round.

“Godfrey has taken her up to the nursery,” said Betty, “partly to show her to Nanna, and partly because we thought it would be better for her to be quiet up there than down here.”

“Oh, Mum—­do say that she can stay up there,” cried Timmy pleadingly.  “I hate the thought of her being in that dark old stable!”

“Very well; put her in the night nursery.”

Even as she spoke, Janet was still gazing at her eldest step-daughter.  Betty certainly looked extraordinarily charming this afternoon.  It showed that the child required more change than she had had for many a long day.  They had got too much, all of them, into thinking of her as a stand-by.  After all she was only eight and twenty!  Janet, with a sigh, looked back to the days when she had been eight and twenty, a very happy, independent young lady indeed, not long before she had met and married her quiet, wool-gathering John, so losing her independence for ever.

“I suppose you haven’t heard the great news,” she exclaimed, forgetting that Timmy was there.

“What news?” asked Betty.

She glanced at her step-mother.  Surely Janet hadn’t been crying?  Janet never cried.  She had not cried since that terrible day when the news had come of George’s death.

“What news?” she asked again.

“Mr. Barton—­I really can’t call him Lionel yet—­came over this afternoon and—­and—­”

Timmy rushed forward in front of his mother, his little face all aglow:  “Oh, Mum!  You don’t mean to say that he’s popped?” he cried.