dose. Phew,
it was a ghastly meal. I'm certain I shall dream it all over again
every time I eat something that doesn't agree with me! It was a great
relief when at last Grandmother turned at the door and looking at my
feet as though they were curiosities, said: 'Joan, you will follow us
to the drawing-room.' Her voice was cold enough to freeze the sea."

"Then she went out, her stick rapping the floor, Grandfather after her
with his shoulders bent and a piece of bread on the back of his dinner
jacket. The two dogs followed, and I made up the tail of that queer
procession. I hate that stiff, cheerless drawing room anyhow, with all
its shiny cases of china and a collection of all the uncomfortable
chairs ever designed since Adam. I wanted to laugh and cry, and when I
saw myself in the glass, I couldn't believe that I wasn't a little
shivering girl with a ribbon in my hair and white socks."

Some one whistled outside. The girl seized the boy's arm in a sudden
panic of fright.

"It's all right," he said. "It's only the gardener going to his
cottage."

Joan laughed, and her grip relaxed. "I'm jumpy," she said. "My nerves
are all over the place. Do you wonder?"

"No, tell me the rest."

Joan's voice took on a little deeper note like that of a child who has
come to the really creepy bit of his story. "Marty," she went on, "I
wish you could have heard the way in which Grandmother let herself go!
She held me by the scruff of my neck and hit me right and left with the
sort of sarcasm that made me crinkle. According to her, I was on the
downward path. I had done something quite hopeless and unforgivable.
She didn't know how she could bring herself to report the affair--think
of calling it an affair, Marty!--to my poor mother. Mother, who'd never
say a word to me, whatever I did! She might have out-of-date views, she
said, of how young girls should behave, but they were the right views,
and so long as I was under her roof and in her care, she would see that
I conformed to them. She went on making a mountain out of our little
molehill, till even Grandfather broke in with a word; and then she
snapped at him, got into her second wind and went off again. I didn't
listen half the time. I just stood and watched her as you'd watch one
of those weird old women in one of Dickens' books come to life. What I
remember of it all is that I am deceitful and fast, ungrateful,
irresponsible, with no sense of decency, and when at last she
pr