annels, with shirt-sleeves rolled up to
the elbows. Even as Daisy looked, Aunt Jeannie passed him a couple of
cushions, and he too sat down on the floor of the punt, close to and
facing her. Daisy had said her headache was not bad, and that it was
only thunder-headache. Neither of these assertions was quite true. Her
headache was bad, and it was not, in the main, thunder-headache at all;
it was headache born of trouble and perplexity and struggle. She did not
in the least understand what was happening.

She had got up early that morning and had gone out before breakfast.
Very likely she was out of sorts, and a row on the river in the coolness
of the day was exactly the right thing to correct morbid and suspicious
impressions, which were founded, so she told herself, not on facts, but
on her own bilious interpretation of facts. And, indeed, in the fresh
dewy morning she found, when she went out, that her imagination, which
had been fairly busy most of the night fitting together, like a Chinese
puzzle, the rather disturbing events of the day before, had been riotous
and sensational. Lord Lindfield, for instance, it was true, had not come
down here early yesterday, as he had suggested, but had gone with Aunt
Jeannie to a concert. Clearly his coming down alone to spend the day
with two (especially one) girls in the country would have been highly
unconventional, and he was very wise not to. So that was disposed of.
They had missed their train and motored down instead, arriving half-way
through dinner. What of that? Unless she was prepared to aver that there
had been no breakdown, what was there to build on here? So that was
disposed of. They had played two games of billiards together last
night--the second fifty, so it appeared, had been doubled--but why not?
Before each game Daisy had been asked if she would not play, and had
refused. Then he had said, as they parted on the landing, that he had
never enjoyed a day more. And what of that? Did not Daisy herself have
"the most heavenly evening I have ever spent" about seven times a week?

Like the sensible girl she was, she took her trouble to bits in that
early morning row, as one may take the mechanism of a clock to bits, and
found there was something faulty in every individual piece of its
working. Clearly, therefore, the whole thing, when pieced together
again, could not reasonably be considered a reliable clock, since there
was something wrong with every single piece of i