“I only mean——You wouldn’t see Mother——Every one looks at you!” And then, “I’m sorry, Laura, but you made me say what I think.” “Of course. I’m glad. I’m glad to know what you think.” Her voice grew higher and higher as she tried to over-top the catch in it. He had put a match to her quick young pride, and it blazed and raged within her till she was quite sick with the physical pain of it. The intolerable, humiliating tears rose under her lids. Always with her back to him she took her handkerchief, screwed it to a point, and removed them with precise care. She could not quite control them, the square danced mistily, but at least she would not show a stained face. Head up before everything! ‘Not natural,’ ‘like an actress.’... Oh, it wasn’t fair of Justin ... wasn’t fair not to give her time to get used to him again.... He’d been grown-up so much longer, but didn’t he remember what it felt like to be shy and awkward and uncertain?... How could one cover it up but by being glib?... At Paris they liked her.... Mrs. Cloud liked her.... Mrs. Cloud had liked her green dress.... She didn’t know what he meant.... It wasn’t vanity, everybody waved their hair.... She couldn’t help her voice being loud.... She had never realized that she was so full of faults.... She had only wanted to make herself nice—and now it was all wrong.... And after looking forward so to Italy.... Not that she cared ... not that she cared a hang!... “Don’t worry, Laura!” Justin was stirred by a vague compunction, though he wished that she did not find it necessary to stand between him and the last of the light. “What does it matter? I told you—it’s nothing to do with me.” She whirled round indignantly, all eyes and flame. “Whom else has it got to do with but you and Mrs. Cloud and Gran’papa? If you feel that way I’ve got to alter things. It’s dreadful! It’s dreadful that you don’t like me any more.” He was obliged to smile at that—a smile that lit up his face as sunshine brightens a room: and suddenly, for the first time since their meeting, he was at home with her again. The simplicity of her passionate distress was so familiar, so entirely the Laura he had missed, that the two alienating years were blotted out, as the darkness was blotting out Laura’s skirts and offending airs and graces, leaving him his foundling again in one of her tragi-comic rages, his rum old Laura, raw from conflict with life and Aunt Adela. She must be smoothed down!... She must be smoothed down at once!... “Here, dry up, Laura,” he advised her, “and don’t talk so much. You’re right, it’s getting too dark to read. Come on out with me and eat spaghetti on the pavement. They say that’s the thing to do when there’s a moon.”