How well she remembered that sunny morning in early April—ages ago! Childhood seems so far off at seventeen. How distinctly she remembered the artist whose refined and gentle manners had won her childish heart! She had been so little praised at South Hill that her pulses thrilled with pleasure when her father’s friend smiled at her flower-crowned head and cried: ‘What a lovely picture! Look, Lawford, would not you like me to paint her just as she is at this moment, with her hair flying in the wind, and that background of rushes and blue water?’ But Sir Vernon turned on his heel with a curt half-muttered answer, and the two men walked on and left her, smoking their cigarettes as they went. She remembered how, in a blind childish fury, scarce knowing why she was angry, she tore the daffodil crown from her hair and trampled it under foot. To the end of his visit the painter called her Asphodel, and one morning finding her alone in the garden, he carried her off to the billiard-room and made a sketch of her head with its loose tangled hair: a head which appeared next year on the line at the Royal Academy and was raved about by all artistic London. And now it was early April again, and she was a girl in the fair dawn of womanhood, free to do what she liked with her life, and there were many things that she was beginning to understand, things not altogether pleasant to her womanly pride. She was beginning to perceive very clearly that her father did not love her, and was never likely to love her, that her presence in his home gave him no pleasure, that he simply endured her as part of the burden of life, while to her sister he gave love without stint or measure. True that he was by nature and habit selfish and self-indulgent, and that the love of such a man is at best hardly worth having. But Daphne would have been glad of her father’s love, were the affection of ever so poor a quality. His indifference chilled her soul. She had been accustomed to command affection; to be petted and praised and bowed down to for her pretty looks and pretty ways; to take a leading position with her schoolfellows, partly because she was Sir Vernon Lawford’s daughter, and partly for those subtle charms and graces which made her superior to the rank and file of school-girls.