it if we'd
known. We are awfully sorry.

Yours truly,

ANNE SEVERN.

P.S. You aren't to answer this.

JERROLD FIELDING.

Half an hour later Jerrold knocked at her door.

"Anne--are you in bed?"

She got up and stood with him at the door in her innocent nightgown.

"It's all right," he said. "I've seen Pinkney. He says we aren't to
worry. He knew we wouldn't have done it if we'd known."

"Was he crying?"

"No. Laughing.... All the same, it'll be a lesson to us," he said.

xii

"Where's Jerrold?"

Robert Fielding called from the dogcart that waited by the porch. Eliot
sat beside him, very stiff and straight, painfully aware of his mother
who stood on the flagged path below, and made yearning faces at him,
doing her best, at this last moment, to destroy his morale. Colin sat
behind him by Jerrold's place, tearful but excited. He was to go with
them to the station. Eliot tried hard to look as if he didn't care; and,
as his mother said, he succeeded beautifully.

It was the end of the holidays.

"Adeline, you might see where Jerrold is."

She went into the house and saw Anne and Jerrold coming slowly down the
stairs together from the gallery. At the turn they stopped and looked at
each other, and suddenly he had her in his arms. They kissed, with
close, quick kisses and then stood apart, listening.

Adeline went back. "The monkey," she thought; "and I who told her she
didn't know how to do it."

Jerrold ran out, very red in the face and defiant. He gave himself to
his mother's large embrace, broke from it, and climbed into the dogcart.
The mare bounded forward, Jerrold and Eliot raised their hats, shouted
and were gone.

Adeline watched while the long lines of the beech-trees narrowed on
them, till the dogcart swung out between the ball-topped pillars of the
Park gates.

Last time their going had been nothing to her. Today she could hardly
bear it. She wondered why.

She turned and found little Anne standing beside her. They moved
suddenly apart. Each had seen the other's tears.

xiii

Outside Colin's window the tree rocked in the wind. A branch brushed
backwards and forwards, it tapped on the pane. Its black shadow shook on
the grey, moonlit wall.

Jerrold's empty bed showed white and dreadful in the moonlight, covered
with a sheet. Colin was frightened.

A narrow passage divided his room from Anne's. The doors stood open. He
called "Anne! Anne!"

A light thud on