For a moment standing, out there in the garden, Time seemed to have been put back: Oliver and she were talking in the old way--indeed, he was just telling her exactly what he meant to write in answer to this all-important letter, when, to Lucy's discomfiture and deep chagrin, General Kemp had suddenly appeared in the garden porch of the Grange and had put a quick sharp end to the discussion. "Your mother wants you, Lucy--will you please go up to her at once?" and the girl had obeyed without saying good-bye, for she felt sure--or perhaps, had hoped to ensure--that Boringdon would wait till she came down again. But alas! when she ran down, a few minutes later, the young man was gone, and her father answered her involuntary look of deep disappointment with one that made her hang her head and blush! The child in Lucy asked itself pitifully how father could have been so unkind. General Kemp had indeed been angry--nay, more than angry. The showing of a letter by a man to a woman is an action which to an onlooker has about it something peculiarly significant and intimate. Standing just within the threshold of his house, seeing the two figures standing on the path close to one another, and so absorbed in what they were saying that some moments elapsed before they looked up and became aware of his presence, the father realised, more than he had done before, Lucy's odd relation to the young man. "What the devil"--so General Kemp asked himself with rising anger--"what the devil did Boringdon mean by all that sort of thing?" "Il faut qu'une porte soît ouverte ou fermée!" The wise French saying which provided de Musset with a title for one of his most poignant tragi-comedies, was probably unknown to General Kemp, but it exactly expressed his feeling. The upright soldier had no liking for half-open doors--for ambiguous sentimental relations. * * * * * "I can't think what the man was thinking of--taking a letter out of his pocket, and showing it to her for all the world as if she were his wife! I wish, Mary, you'd say a word to Lucy." "What word would you have me say, Tom?" Mrs. Kemp raised herself painfully in bed. She still felt in all her bones the violent chill she had caught, and the being compelled to lie aside had made her, what she so seldom was, really depressed. On this unfortunate afternoon she had followed with intuitive knowledge every act of the little drama enacted downstairs: she had heard the General's sharply uttered command; noted Lucy's breathless eager longing to be down again; and then she had heard the front door open and shut; and she had listened, almost as disappointedly as Lucy might have done, to Boringdon's firm steps hurrying up the road past her windows. If only she had not caught this stupid cold, all this might have been prevented! To-morrow she must really persuade the doctor to let her come down again.