and Yorkshire pudding of the admiral's Sabbath. "I hope I shall see Ronald Cavendish"--so distinct were the words that they might have been actually spoken. "It's clearing up," announced her father-in-law. "You'll have a jolly walk. Ought to start about half-past three. Better have some tea at the Bull. Service is at half-past five." "I don't think I'll go," said Aliette. "I've got rather a headache." "Do your headache good," rumbled the admiral. She pulled herself together. Why shouldn't she go to Key Hatch; why shouldn't she meet Ronald Cavendish? Not, of course, that she really wanted to meet Ronald Cavendish. . . .

"I wonder why on earth I invented that headache," thought Aliette, as she and Mollie tramped down the drive. Hector had returned to work in the library; he waved them au revoir from the desk by the window. A fantasy came to her: "I shall never see Hector again." She said to herself: "I hope he hasn't gone back to town." She said to herself: "Aliette, don't be an absolute idiot." For, after all, could anything be more idiotic than that a woman of nearly thirty--and that woman Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hector Brunton, wife of Hector Brunton, K.C.--should feel like--like a schoolgirl going to meet her first choir-boy? And yet, instinctively, Aliette knew herself somehow caught, somehow entangled. No escape from that knowledge! Ridiculous or not, this stranger she was going to meet--of course they would meet him; he couldn't have gone back to town--interested her. Interested her enormously. She saw him again in the eyes of her mind, his serious face, his blue eyes, his hair--such curious hair, goldy-gray as though bleached by the tropics,--all the while she swung, listening to Mollie's chatter, along the familiar lanes. A low sun, emerging from between gold-edged clouds, shone on them walking. The hedges dripped cool sparkles. Cow-parsley pushed its feathery green through the tangled grass of the ditches. They topped the rise by Moor Farm, and saw Key Hatch below them. It lay in a cup of the valley, gray and brown and slate-blue through leafless branches against the concave jade of pasture-land. Half a mile on, midway between them and the village, two figures strolled up-hill.Social sense, banishing idiotic fantasies, reasserted itself in Hector Brunton's wife; and, five minutes later, the four figures met.

"How do you do, Mrs. Brunton?"
"How do you do, Mr. Cavendish?"

Ronnie introduced his friend; Aliette introduced them both to Mollie.

The friend, James Wilberforce, carried his five feet eleven well. He had broad shoulders and a rather clever face, aquiline 

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