"Never mind, Olwen fach," he said, with a hand on her shoulder. "There won't be much work done this morning. I'm going into the woods. Just hand me my specimen-case ... ah, here. And file the June numbers of that Danish magazine—where on earth did I put 'em?—ah, there. Then there are a couple of letters to copy into the book, and that's all. You can come on and find me; I shall be where we went yesterday with Mrs. Cartwright and that young What's-his-name, the flying officer."

He set aside the two letters to be copied, planting upon them, as a paper weight, one of the enormous pine-cones that he had picked up in the forest. Then he slung on his specimen-case, took up his indented grey hat, smiled and nodded to the girlish figure at the table, and went out.

Olwen, left alone, stretched her arms over her head. "Oh!" she sighed, desperately. She moved the jar of arbutus into place again; picked out a spray, dark-leafed, berried with scarlet and orange, tried it against the dull serge of her frock. Then she tilted her chair back so that she could just see herself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. It showed her a forlorn little face.

"He'd never look at me, I know," she told herself.

She thrust the spray of arbutus back into water and turned to her work listlessly enough.

Half an hour later the listlessness had finished.

A miracle had begun to work!

For the Professor's niece and secretary was pouring breathlessly over a letter that she had found on the table under a file of notes for J. Howel-Jones's great work on Agarics.

With shining credulous eyes she turned from that typewritten letter to the little packet that had been enclosed in it. Then she turned to the letter again. She read:

CONTENTS

"Half the trouble in the world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in love ... with the wrong people."

She read the astonishing suggestion:

CONTENTS

"Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ."

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