th offers of every kind of help from her father's friends, but naturally she needed no help and had no wish to see anybody in her presen

d called at Eaton Terrace. But that afternoon Lucy and Miss Entwhistle were taking the air in a car Wemyss had hired, and at the very moment the young man was being turned away from the Eaton Terrace door Lucy was being rowed about the river at Hamp

ntwhistle unexpectedly that evenin

stion or said a thing about him up to then, excep

iscovered, she had no idea. It had never occurred to her even to wonder what he was, much less

er?' said Miss Entwhistle. 'We know he

' said Lucy, looking a

t kissing her good-night. 'Except punctual,' she a

tidying themselves for tea in the ladies' room of the hotel she turned from the looking-glass in the act of pinning back som

tupidly at her aunt at the other questi

ie of?' she rep

as it?' asked her au

llness,' said L

an il

it was an

ng the hairpin out of her mouth and in he

ious one,' said Lucy,

nowledge of which seemed somehow so intimately to bin

that her aunt, who had already once or twice expressed what she said was her surprised admiration for Mr. Wemyss's heroic way of bearing his bereavement, might be too admiringly surprised altogether if she knew how tra

how he bears things.' And again in her mind's eye, a

most bald way he had of talking frankly about things more sophisticated people wo

ored down one Sunday to lunch in that very room, and it had been so much crowded, and the crowding had

repeated Wemyss, looking at them with a face full

leaning across to him, 'don'

k he was talking about Vera? Any one with a grain of sense w

ressed his next remark to her. But in

said, 'I've been d

those eight visits his first impression of her remained undisturbed in his mind: she was a wailing creature who had hung round him in Cornwall in a constant state of tears. Down there she had behaved exactly like the traditional foolish woman when there is a death about,-no common sense, no grit, crying if you looked at her, and keeping up a continual dismal recital of the virtues of the departed. Also she had been obstinate; and she had, besides, shown unmistakable signs of selfishness. When he paid his first call in Eaton Terrace he did no

across a tea-table which was undoubtedly for the moment his, asking him straigh

if it had come from him of his own accord. Surely a man has a right, he thought, to his own accord. At all times Wemyss disliked being as

t disagreeable, that she was dying to know what he was. She could see for herself, she said, smiling down at the leg nearest her, that he wasn't a bi

t. He had no objection to being taken for

d her that he was on

xchange being an institution whose nature and operations were alien to anything the Entwhistles were fam

ed her impatiently from his mind and concentrated on his little love, asking himself while he did so how short he could, with any sort of

moments he and she were alone, to urge Lucy to tell her aunt. Nobody else need know, he wrote; it could go on being kept secret from the world; but the convenience of her aunt'

at passed would make their engagement less a thing that need surprise. She said that at present it would tak

ad of for ever sticking; and his little love must see how splendid it would be for him to come and spend happy hours with her quite alone. What was an aunt after all? he asked. What could she possibly be, compared to Lucy's own Everard? Be

e's development of an independent and inquiring mind, and she hated having to refuse or even to defer doing anything he asked, when her aunt one morning at breakfast

d bear no more of these shocks. A clean

stle's Christian name was Dorothy,-'I

ly. 'We shall need lots of time, and to be un

he began talking

r eyes carefully on her toast and