g her his reasons.

"He's not the sort of man I want you to know," he finished. "That ought
to be sufficient. Have you seen him since?"

Lily flushed, but she did not like to lie.

"I had tea with him one afternoon. I often have tea with men, father.
You know that."

"You knew I wouldn't approve, or you would have mentioned it."

Because he felt that he had been rather ruthless with her, he stopped
in at the jeweler's the next morning and sent her a tiny jeweled watch.
Lily was touched and repentant. She made up her mind not to see Louis
Akers again, and found a certain relief in the decision. She was
conscious that he had a peculiar attraction for her, a purely emotional
appeal. He made her feel alive. Even when she disapproved of him, she
was conscious of him. She put him resolutely out of her mind, to have
him reappear in her dreams, not as a lover, but as some one dominant and
insistent, commanding her to do absurd, inconsequential things.

Now and then she saw Willy Cameron, and they had gone back, apparently,
to the old friendly relationship. They walked together, and once they
went to the moving pictures, to Grace's horror. But there were no
peanuts to eat, and instead of the jingling camp piano there was an
orchestra, and it was all strangely different. Even Willy Cameron was
different. He was very silent, and on the way home he did not once speak
of the plain people.

Louis Akers had both written and telephoned her, but she made excuses,
and did not see him, and the last time he had hung up the receiver
abruptly. She felt an odd mixture of relief and regret.

Then, about the middle of April, she saw him again.

Spring was well on by that time. Before the Doyle house on Cardew Way
the two horse-chestnuts were showing great red-brown buds, ready to fall
into leaf with the first warm day, and Elinor, assisted by Jennie,
the elderly maid, was finishing her spring house-cleaning. The Cardew
mansion showed window-boxes at each window, filled by the florist with
spring flowers, to be replaced later by summer ones. A potted primrose
sat behind the plate glass of the Eagle Pharmacy, among packets of
flower seeds and spring tonics, its leaves occasionally nibbled by
the pharmacy cat, out of some atavistic craving survived through long
generations of city streets.

The children's playground near the Lily furnace was ready; Howard Cardew
himself had overseen the locations of the swings and chute-the-chutes.
And