determined not to sit down also and so give an air of settled ease
to the interview.

"I--I hope you are better, Ishmael?" faltered Phoebe. She had never
before been in a young man's bedroom, even bereft of its tenant, and she
felt shy and fluttered.

"Oh, I'm all right!" answered Ishmael. "I don't think poor Silly Peter
has enough muscle to hit very hard, you know."

A look of intense relief floated across the strained demureness of
Phoebe's countenance: raised eyelids and a heightened colour testified
to what passed through her mind.

"Oh, then it was Silly Peter--" she began ingenuously; then broke off.

"Yes, didn't you know? He was dazed with the lights, and then the sudden
darkness and all of us being so angry, I suppose.... Hullo, what's
that?"

It was Killigrew's voice calling softly up the stairs to Vassie. She
hesitated, made a feint of going to the door only to hear what he
wanted, and then went rustling down to him. Phoebe snuggled a little
more comfortably on her chair with an unconscious movement of pleasure.

"He said downstairs he wanted to finish taking her picture to-day while
the light lasted," she said; then ran on: "Ishmael, I've been so
unhappy...."

"Have you, Phoebe? Why, what about?" Then, as he saw her flush and
bite her pouting lower lip, he added: "Not because of me? I say, how
jolly of you! But there wasn't any necessity--"

"How silly you are! As if one did things--worried and that sort of
thing--because it was necessary! It's because one can't help it."

"Then it was all the nicer of you. But I meant that really it wasn't
anything to worry about. I'm as right as rain, and it's given me a jolly
good excuse to go up to London and see the world."

Panic peeped in Phoebe's brown eyes, giving her a flashing look of
something woodland, despite her would-be smart attire. She dropped her
lids to hide it.

"London...." she murmured. Then, sitting upright, and staring at her
twisting fingers:

"Ishmael!..."

A pause which Ishmael broke by asking, "Well?"

"Nothing. Only--I was wondering. Whether you ... how you'd like London,
and whether you wouldn't find down here, and all of us, very dull when
you come back?"

"What rot! Of course not! Why should I?" asked Ishmael, already so in
London in anticipation that he could not even take an interest in his
return to this older world.

"Oh, I don't know. I only wondered. You never wonder about things, do
you, Ishmael?"

"I don't thi