He saw the fleeing fair one disappear into the distance and in the shortest time on record he heard the clanging of her bicycle bell as she scorched down his drive. "Puffy and stippled"--"Puffy and stippled"! Mr. Withells repeated to himself this rudely personal remark as he walked slowly towards the house. What could she mean? And what in the world had he said to make her so angry? Women were really most unaccountable. He ascended his handsome staircase and went into his dressing-room, and there he sought his looking-glass, which stood in the window, and surveyed himself critically. Yes, his cheeks _were_ a bit puffy near the nostrils, and, as is generally the case in later life, the pores of the skin were a bit enlarged, but for all that he was quite a personable man. He sighed. Miss Ross, he feared, was not nearly so sensible as he had thought. It was distinctly disappointing. * * * * * For the first mile and a quarter Jan scorched all she knew. The angry blood was thumping in her ears and she exclaimed indignantly at intervals, "How dared he! How dared he!" Then she punctured a tyre. There was no hope of getting it mended till she reached Wren's End, when Earley would do it for her. As she pushed her bicycle along the lane she recovered her sense of humour and she laughed. And presently she became aware of a faint, sweet, elusive perfume from some flowering shrub on the other side of somebody's garden wall. It strongly resembled the smell of a blossoming tree that grew on Ridge Road, Malabar Hill. And in one second Jan was in Bombay, and was standing in the moonlight, looking up into a face that was neither puffy nor stippled nor prim; but young and thin and worn and very kind. And the exquisite understanding of that moment came back to her, and her eyes filled with tears. Yet in another moment she was again demanding indignantly, "How dared he!" She went straight to her room when she got in, and, like Mr. Withells, she went and looked at herself in the glass. Unlike Mr. Withells, she saw nothing there to give her any satisfaction. She shook her head at the person in the glass and said aloud: "If that's all you get by trying to be sensible, the sooner you become a drivelling idiot the better for your peace of mind--and your vanity." The person in the glass shook her head back at Jan, and Jan turned away thoroughly disgusted with such a futile sort of _tu quoque_. CHAPTER XXI ANOTHER WAY OF LOVE