turer, who lived with his sons and daughter in a
solitary and ancient house at Toft End.

Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands--his famous
way with women seemed to have deserted him--and then he actually stated
that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He had gone
before the girls could move.

When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused,
hostile, almost homicidal.

'I hope I didn't spoil a _tete-a-tete_,' said May Deane, stiffly and
sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature.

The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but
overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.

'No,' she answered; 'but if you had come three minutes earlier----'

She smiled calmly.

'Oh!' murmured May Deane, after a pause.

III

That evening May Deane returned home at half-past nine. She had been
with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport, and she told
her father, who was reading the _Staffordshire Signal_ in his accustomed
solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had
declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower
good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before
retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss
certain household matters: Jim's early breakfast, the proper method of
washing Herbert's new flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were
shrunk), and the dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she
went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down
near the window.

She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming
nunlike mystery which often comes to a woman who lives alone and
unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one, save
the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie
might glance carelessly through the open door in passing along the
corridor, but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room
would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have
exclaimed with momentary interest, 'So this is May's room!' And some
hint that May was more than a daughter and sister--a woman, withdrawn,
secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the
household life--might have penetrated their obtuse paternal and
fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and mouth were
perfect, and at either ex