the best of it--particularly as he says
that he's come back to England for good."

She went out of the room, and so into the garden--back to the border she
had left unwillingly but at which she now glanced down with a sensation
of disgust. She felt thoroughly ruffled and upset--a very unusual
condition for her to be in, for Janet Tosswill was an equable and
happy-natured woman, for all her affectionate and sensitive heart.

She told herself that it was true the whole world had altered in the last
nine years--everything had altered except Beechfield. The little Surrey
village seemed to her mind exactly the same as it was when she had come
there, as a bride, fourteen years ago, except that almost everybody in
it, from being comfortably off, had become uncomfortably poor. Then all
at once, she smiled. The garden of Old Place was very different from the
garden she had found when she first came there. It had been a melancholy,
neglected, singularly ugly garden--the kind of garden which only costly
bedding-out had made tolerable in some prosperous early Victorian day.
Now it was noted for its charm and beauty even among the many beautiful
gardens of the neighbourhood, and during the War she had made quite a lot
of money selling flowers and fruit for the local Red Cross. Now she was
trying to coax her husband to take one of the glebe fields on a long
lease in order to start a hamper trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers.
Dolly, the one of her three step-daughters whom she liked least, was fond
of gardening, in a dull plodding way, and might be trained to such work.

But try though she did to forget Godfrey Radmore, her mind swung
ceaselessly back to the man with whom she had just had that curious talk
on the telephone. She was sorry--not glad as a more worldly woman would
have been--that Godfrey Radmore was coming back into their life.

CHAPTER II

While Janet Tosswill was thinking so intently of Godfrey Radmore, he
himself was standing at the window of a big bedroom in one of those
musty, expensive, old-fashioned hotels, which, perhaps because they are
within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, still have faithful patrons all the
year round, and are full to bursting during the London Season. As to
Radmore, he had chosen it because it was the place where the grandfather
who had brought him up always stayed when he, Godfrey, was a little boy.

Tall, well-built after the loose-limbed English fashion, and with a dark,
in