"Very well," answered the young girl. "But we can keep very much to ourselves all the time they are here, can't we? We needn't make their acquaintance--at least--" she stopped short, realising that it would be impossible to avoid knowing Brook's people if they were stopping in the same hotel. "Their acquaintance!" Mrs. Bowring laughed bitterly at the idea. "Oh--I forgot," said Clare. "At all events, we need not meet unnecessarily. That's what I mean, you know." There was a short pause, during which her mother seemed to be thinking. "I shall see him alone, for I have something to say to him," she said at last, as though she had come to a decision. "Go out, my dear," she added. "Leave me alone a little while. I shall be all right when it is time for luncheon." Her daughter left her, but she did not go out at once. She went to her own room and sat down to think over what she had seen and heard. If she went out she should probably find Johnstone waiting for her, and she did not wish to meet him just then. It was better to be alone. She would find out why the idea of not seeing him any more had hurt her after she had spoken. But that was not an easy matter at all. So soon as she tried to think of herself and her own feelings, she began to think of her mother. And when she endeavoured to solve the mystery and guess the secret, her thoughts flew off suddenly to Brook, and she wished that she were outside in the sunshine talking to him. And again, as the probable conversation suggested itself to her, she was glad that she was not with him, and she tried to think again. Then she forced herself to recall the scene with Lady Fan on the terrace, and she did her best to put him in the worst possible light, which in her opinion was a very bad light indeed. And his father before him--Adam--her mother had told her the name for the first time, and it struck her as an odd one--old Adam Johnstone had been a heart-breaker, and a faith-breaker, and a betrayer of women before Brook was in the world at all. Her theory held good, when she looked at it fairly, and her resentment grew apace. It was natural enough, for in her imagination she had always hated that first husband of her mother's who had come and gone before her father; and now she extended her hatred to this probable brother, and it had much more force, because the man was alive and a reality, and was soon to come and be a visible talking person. There was one good point about him and his coming. It helped her to revive her hatred of Brook and to colour it with the inheritance of some harm done to her own mother. That certainly was an advantage.