But it was patent that Laura, slightly annoying to Justin though her attitude might be, must stick to her principles and remain aloof. And for a wavering, half-hearted week or two she did remain aloof, attending strictly to her own affairs, settling down to quiet life in Brackenhurst, to dusting the drawing-room and paying calls with Aunt Adela and bearing with a Gran’papa grown no younger and no less tetchy in two years. Out of the tail of her eye, however, she could observe Justin, missing her but little, it seemed, as, his camera hung from his shoulder, he passed her in Brackenhurst by-ways with a nod and a smile. That she could have borne longer, but when she next took tea at the Priory she found that Annabel Moulde, who had also left school and put up her hair and who wore a frock and a manner that made Laura feel childish, was also taking tea at the Priory, and that Justin (who had never liked Annabel) was nevertheless confiding to her, over chocolate _éclairs_, items of oological interest that he ought to have been telling Laura. (Surely he ought to have been telling them to Laura?) She said less about cruelty to parent birds, and the comparative value of a dead shell and a live songster as she stood beside Justin ten minutes later at his open cabinet and admired a fortnight’s spoils. Justin (I do not know why) had asked her to come and look at them, and Annabel (I do not know how) had been left in the drawing-room to talk to Mrs. Cloud. Annabel was calling on Mrs. Cloud, wasn’t she? And Laura went out with Justin the next morning by invitation, and was sound on the axiom that birds could not count. On the following afternoon she was the proud discoverer of a willow-wren’s nest that Justin had overlooked, and their Saturday whole-day expedition to the Warren Woods beyond Beech Hill was such a success that it became a weekly institution.