“Because, I fancy, he may have told me first.” Her father nodded and left the dining-room. Alone in his small study he whistled softly to himself. He was no fool, and assuredly he was no snob. It had never occurred to him that Lionel Pomfret had more than a brotherly interest in his girl. Before he went to India, the pair had played tennis together, but what of that? Lionel had been far more intimate with Joyce’s brothers. Why should he write to her first? Why shouldn’t he? But Joyce had blushed a little as he left the dining-room. He attempted for the first time to envisage her as a wife, a mother. Everything that was hard in the parson softened as he beheld his daughter with a child in her arms, mistress in her own house, independent of him altogether. Upon second thoughts, he decided finally that he was leaping to unwarrantable conclusions. She would have read a love-letter alone in her room. And she was incapable of deceit. Still, her blush worried him, and the artless avowal that Lionel had written to her first. Yes, yes; something might come of this. A great joy, perhaps a great sorrow. One conviction troubled him. Sir Geoffrey would make himself intolerably unpleasant. Meanwhile, Joyce’s blush lingered upon her cheeks. Her father’s hasty exit disturbed her. She was quite aware of what she had done, of the thoughts which her indiscreet words must have provoked. She wondered if she could allay such thoughts by showing him the letter. It was a jolly letter, a sincere reflection of the writer, so that it seemed to be the spoken rather than the written word. It might have been dashed off by one subaltern to another. Joyce had half a dozen such epistles upstairs. It may be added here that no love passages, in the literal sense, had taken place between these two correspondents. But—she had blushed. And she was the first to be told that he was coming home. Joyce put away the letter with the others, and set forth on her common round. Such as it was, it sufficed her. She held her head high, and little of interest escaped her brown eyes. Town girls would have pitied her. She pitied them. Not to know the names of birds and flowers and butterflies, to be detached from interest in humbler neighbours, to be denied the privilege of small ministrations, must surely take from life much of the joy in living. Her sense of the present, so vivid and acute, her happy ignorance of life outside her tiny circle, prevented her from traffics, voyages and discoveries into the future.