hat'll be all right, won't it, Anne?" Banks replied.

But Anne, still leaning back in the corner of the settle, refused to
answer.

Jervaise turned and looked down at her. "If you all went...?" he said,
giving his incomplete sentence the sound of a question.

"Oh! I should certainly go, too," she replied.

Jervaise frowned moodily. I could see that he was caught in an awkward
dilemma, but I was not absolutely sure as to the form it took. Had Anne
made conditions? Her remark seemed, I thought, to hint a particular
stipulation. Had she tried to coerce him with the threat of accompanying
her brother to Canada unless the engagement to Brenda was openly
sanctioned by the family?

"But you must see how impossible it is," Jervaise said, still looking at
Anne.

"_We_ don't think so," Brenda put in.

"You don't understand," her brother returned savagely.

"_You_ don't," Brenda replied.

Jervaise snorted impatiently, but he had enough control of himself to
avoid the snare of being drawn into a bickering match.

"It isn't as if the decision rested with me," he went on, looking down at
the hearth-rug, but still, I fancy, addressing himself almost exclusively
to Anne. "I can't make my father and mother see things as you do. No one
could. Why can't you compromise?"

"Oh! _How_?" Brenda broke out with a fierce contempt.

"Agree to separate--for a time," Jervaise said. "Let Banks go to Canada
and start a farm or something, and afterwards you could join him without
any open scandal."

"Any mortal thing to save a scandal, of course," Brenda commented
scornfully.

"Would _you_ be prepared to do that?" Jervaise asked, turning to Banks.

I thought Banks seemed a trifle irresolute, as though the bribe of finally
possessing Brenda was tempting enough to outweigh any other consideration.
But he looked at her before replying, and her contemptuous shake of the
head was completely decisive. He could not question any determination of
hers.

"No, I wouldn't," he said.

"But look here, Brenda, why..." Jervaise began on a note of desperate
reasonableness.

"Because I'm going out _with_ him," Brenda said. They might have chased
that argument round for half an hour if Ronnie had not once more
interposed.

His dudgeon had been slowly giving place to a shocked surprise. It was
being borne in upon his reluctant mind that Brenda and Banks honestly
intended to get married. And here was Frank Jervaise, for some mistaken
purpose of h