But just at this moment she was enjoying a certain sense of freedom which the shifting of the responsibility of her mother on to stronger shoulders had given her. She had, owing to the circumstances I have related, seen very little of her native country, although she had travelled widely on the Continent and in more distant lands, and she anticipated with keen enjoyment the visit she was about to pay to a friend who lived in the east of England. This friend had been a school-fellow--that is to say, she had been one of the older girls when Philippa, a shy child of fourteen, had arrived, unhappy and awkward, among a crowd of new faces in an unknown land. Marion Wells, as she then was, was one of those people in whom the motherly instinct is strong, even in youth. She had taken Philippa under her wing, and being by no means daunted by an apparent want of response which she rightly attributed to its proper cause, a strong friendship had grown up between them, which had continued, in spite of meetings few and far between, until the present day. Marion had married, very soon after leaving school, a man who, while invalided home from South Africa, had excited her first to pity and then to love. She mothered her big soldier regardless of his stalwart size and now perfect physique much in the same way in which she had mothered Philippa in her childhood, and her loving heart was still further satisfied by the possession of a son, now eight years old. Bill Heathcote had retired from the army, and was living on a property to which he had succeeded on the death of his grandmother some three years ago. Lady Lawson's last words returned to Philippa's memory: "Good-bye, my darling child. I do hope you will have a good time!" She smiled at the recollection. A good time! It was an expression which had been very frequently on her mother's lips, as it is on the lips of so many people now-a-days. It may mean so many things. To Lady Lawson it meant a succession of social gaieties. Well, she thought with thankfulness, these were hardly to be expected at Bessacre. Marion had expressly stated that Philippa must not look forward to anything of the kind. Their only excitements at this season of the year were a few garden parties which could hardly be called amusing, but that she might have plenty of golf if she cared for the game. Also, if time hung too heavily, they might indulge in the frantic dissipation of motoring over to Renwick and listening to the band on the pier.