“You’re a wily old trout, you are. But it isn’t your home. If anything happened to father and me, where would you be? You ought to have married and had some jolly kids. Nether-Applewhite is famous for its pretty girls.” Fishpingle was cornered, but his humour rescued him. He said slyly: “Pretty, yes; but not very highly educated, Master Lionel.” “I see. We’re getting to grips now. My great-grandmother, so I have heard, made a bit of a pet of you. She saw to it that you got a better education than our girls. Obviously, she intended you to profit by that and cut loose. For some inscrutable reason you didn’t. If that education, old chap, made a bachelor of you, it was rather a questionable blessing, eh?” “Perhaps.” Fishpingle’s face had assumed the impenetrable mask of the highly trained English servant. Lionel glanced at him. “Ah! You refuse to rise?” “The trout, Master Lionel, are fairly on the feed now.” He pointed to the river, with many rippling circles upon its surface. Lionel had tact enough to say no more. He picked up his rod, sticking out of the ground beside him. “Try a May fly,” suggested Fishpingle. Lionel did so. The pair separated, Fishpingle taking the upper reaches, above the village. Lionel fished diligently without much success, possibly because his heart was not in his work. From time to time he glanced down stream at a spot where the road shone white above the meadowsweet and rushes. Joyce Hamlin might float into sight at any minute, but she didn’t. Lionel felt slightly piqued as the sun rose to the zenith. Surely, upon his first day at home, she might have come. His Colonel, a man of the world, had impressed this maxim, upon his subaltern: “Women do what they like. Many of ’em undertake thankless jobs. That is because the spirit of self-sacrifice warms ’em to the core.” Was Joyce that sort of woman? He began to think of her as a woman. A pal, so he interpreted the word, would have joined another pal. And if some definite duty kept her from him, she would have mentioned it before breakfast. Deliberately, she had let him think that she would come. And she hadn’t. Some woman’s reason accounted for her absence.