I should be always afraid of you--of your pride and your violence--and
love mustn't be afraid. Good-bye!"

He tried to scoff, but the words had burnt into his heart.

CHAPTER XII

It was in the early morning, a few days after her arrival at Scarfedale
Manor, the house of her two maiden aunts, that Connie, while all the
Scarfedale household was still asleep, took pen and paper and began a
letter to Nora Hooper.

On the evening before Connie left Oxford there had been a long and
intimate scene between these two. Constance, motherless and sisterless,
and with no woman friend to turn to more understanding than Annette, had
been surprised in passionate weeping by Nora, the night after the
Marmion catastrophe. The tact and devotion of the younger girl had been
equal to the situation. She humbly admired Connie, and yet was directly
conscious of a strength in herself, in which Connie was perhaps lacking,
and which might be useful to her brilliant cousin. At any rate on this
occasion she showed so much sweetness, such power, beyond her years, of
comforting and understanding, that Connie told her everything, and
thenceforward possessed a sister and a confidante. The letter ran as
follows:--

* * * * *

"DEAREST NORA,--I have only been at Scarfedale Manor a week, and already
I seem to have been living here for months. It is a dear old house, very
like the houses one used to draw when one was four years old--a doorway
in the middle, with a nice semicircular top, and three windows on either
side; two stories above with seven windows each, and a pretty dormered
roof, with twisted brick chimneys, and a rookery behind it; also a
walled garden, and a green oval grass-plot between it and the road. It
seems to me that everywhere you go in England you find these houses,
and, I dare say, people like my aunts living in them.

"They are very nice to me, and as different as possible from each other.
Aunt Marcia must have been quite good-looking, and since she gave up
wearing a rational dress which she patented twenty-five years ago, she
has always worn either black silk or black satin, a large black satin
hat, rather like the old 'pokes,' with black feathers in winter and
white feathers in summer, and a variety of lace scarves--real
lace--which she seems to have collected all over the world. Aunt
Winifred says that the Unipantaloonicoat'--the name of the patented
thing--lost Aunt Marcia all her lovers