"Yes, I think I will this time, and I believe, too, that the philosophy has collapsed. I'm sure she's a mass of ruffled feathers, and her mind is full of things that she will hurl at the devoted head of her maid when she gets in. You can only really wound that type of woman to the quick by touching her clothes. There now, is that severe enough?" "Why do we always talk of Mrs. Delaport Green?" asked Molly. "Because she is on trial in your mind and you are not quite sure whether she suits." "I might go further and fare worse," said Molly. "Is there no one you would naturally go to?" asked Edmund. "There is the aunt who brought me up, Mrs. Carteret, and I'd rather--" She paused. "There is nothing in this world I would not rather do than go back to her." Molly's face was completely overcast; it was threatening and angry. "Poor child!" said Edmund gently. "I wonder," said Molly, "if anybody used to say 'poor child' when I was small. There must have been some one who pitied an orphan, even in the cheerful, open-air system of Aunt Anne's house, where no one ever thought of feelings, or fancies, or frights at night, or loneliness." Edmund looked at her with a sympathy that tried to conceal his curiosity. "Was it possible," he wondered, "that she really thought she was an orphan?" "It's dreadful to think of a very lonely child," he said. "But some people have to be lonely all their lives," said Molly. Sir Edmund was touched. She had raised her head and looked at him with a pleading confidence. Then, with one swift movement, she was suddenly kneeling and tearing to pieces two or three primroses in succession. "Some people have to say things that can never be really said, or else keep everything shut up." "Don't you think they may make a mistake, and that the things can be said--" He hesitated; he did not want to press her unfairly into confidence; "to the right person?" he concluded rather lamely. "Who is to find the right person?" said Molly bitterly; "the right person is easy to find for people who have just ordinary cares and difficulties, but the people who are in real difficulties don't easily find the right person. I doubt if he or she exists myself!" She turned to find Edmund Grosse looking at her with far too much meaning in his face; there was a degree and intensity of interest in his look that might be read in more than one way. Molly blushed with the simplicity suited to seventeen rather than to twenty-one. She was very near to the first outpouring in her life, the torrent of her pent-up thoughts and feelings was pressing against the flood-gates. It seemed to her that she had never known true and real sympathy before she felt that look. She held out her hands towards him with a little unconscious gesture of appeal. "I have had a strange life," she said; "I am in very strange circumstances now." But Edmund suddenly got up, and before she could speak again a slight sound on the path showed her that some one was coming.