her.

Her whole attitude to the world, during her first season in London, had
been an attitude of wonder, of expectation, of the uncertainty that
comes from expectation.

With that expectation were also alarm, distrust, and it was only when
some sudden incident or person called happiness into her face that that
distrust vanished.

Now she was older, that hesitation and awkwardness were gone, but with
their departure had vanished, too, much of her honesty. Her dark eyes
were as sincere as they had ever been, but to anyone who had known her
before her attitude now was assumed. Nothing might catch her unprepared,
but what experiences were they that had taught her the need for armour?

Sitting in her room looking on to a lawn that would soon be white and to
Downs obscured already by the thick tumbling snow, she knew that she was
unhappy, disappointed, even alarmed. Suddenly to-day the uneasiness that
had been gathering before her throughout the last weeks assumed, on this
afternoon, the definite tangibility of a challenge.

"What's the matter--with me, with everything?... What's happened?"

Her room, dark green and white, had no pictures, but a long low
book-case with grave handsome books, an edition of someone in red with
white paper labels and another edition of someone else in dark blue and
another in gold and brown, an old French gilt mirror, square, with a
reflection of the garden and the foot of the Downs in it, an old Queen
Anne rosewood writing-table, some Queen Anne chairs, a gate-legged
table--a very cool, quiet room.

At her feet with his head resting on her shoe there lay a dog. This dog
about a fortnight ago she had found in a field near the house with a
kettle tied on to his tail, and his body a confused catastrophe of mud
and blood.

She had carried him home; it had needed some courage to introduce him
into the household, for Roddy possessed many dogs all of the finest
breeds, and this was a mongrel who defied description. He was very
short and shaggy and stumpy. He was much too large for a Yorkshire
terrier and yet that was undoubtedly his derivation. There was something
of a sheep-dog in him and something of a Skye; his hair fell all over
his face and, when you could see them, his eyes were brown. His nose was
like a wet blackberry and his ears were long and full of emotion; when
he ran his short tail, on which the hairs were arranged like branches on
a Christmas tree, stuck up into the air and he