met Godfrey Radmore, and, after that for Enid, another delightful stretch
of London life.

She had felt it intolerable to go back to the old, dull life, on an
income which seemed smaller than ever with rising prices, and everything
sacrificed, or so it had seemed to her, to Colonel Crofton's new,
dog-breeding hobby. She resented too, perhaps, more bitterly than she
knew herself, her husband's altered attitude to herself. From having been
passionately, foolishly in love, he had become critical, and, what to her
was especially intolerable, jealous. For a time she had kept up with some
of her war-time acquaintances, but there was a strain of curious timidity
in her nature, and she grew afraid of Colonel Crofton. Even now, when
Enid Crofton, free at last, remembered those dreary months in the shabby
little manor-house which Colonel Crofton had taken after the Armistice,
she told herself, with a quickened pulse, that flesh and blood cannot
stand more than a certain amount of dulness and discomfort. But she
seldom went back in thought to that hateful time. She had wanted to
obliterate, as far as was possible, all recollection of the place where
she had spent such unhappy months, and where had occurred the tragedy
of her husband's death. And it would have been difficult to find two
dwelling-houses more different than the lonely, austere-looking, Fildy
Fe Manor, which stood surrounded by water-clogged fields, some two
miles from an unattractive, suburban Essex town, and the delightful,
picturesque, cheerful-looking Trellis House which formed an integral part
of a prosperous-looking and picturesque Surrey village.

* * * * *

At last Mrs. Crofton settled herself down into her low-ceilinged, square
little sitting-room, and, looking round at her new possessions, she told
herself that outwardly her new home was perfect.

The Trellis House had been for a short time in the possession of a
clever, modern architect who had done his best to restore the building to
what it must have been before it had been transformed, early in the 19th
century, from a farm into a so-called gentleman's house. He had uncovered
the old oak beams, stripped five layers of paper off the walls of the
living rooms, and laid bare what panelling there was--in fact he had
restored the interior of the old building, while leaving the rose and
clematis covered trellis which was on the portion of the house standing
at right angles to