"I _must_ win," repeated Joanna doggedly. "You see, it was like this ..." Not for the first time she proceeded to recount the sale of Donkey Street and the way she had applied the money. He wished she wouldn't talk about that sort of thing the first hour they were together. "I quite see, darling," he exclaimed in the middle of the narrative, and shut her mouth with a kiss. "Oh, Bertie, you mustn't." "Why not?" "We're in a cab--people will see." "They won't--they can't see in--and I'm not going to drive all this way without kissing you." He took hold of her. "I won't have it--it ain't seemly." But he had got a good hold of her, and did as he liked. Joanna was horrified and ashamed. A motor-bus had just glided past the cab and she felt that the eyes of all the occupants were upon her. She managed to push Albert away, and sat very erect beside him, with a red face. "It ain't seemly," she muttered under her breath. Bertie was vexed with her. He assumed an attitude intended to convey displeasure. Joanna felt unhappy, and anxious to conciliate him, but she was aware that any reconciliation was bound to lead to a repetition of that conduct so eminently shocking to the occupants of passing motor-buses. "I don't like London folk to think I don't know how to behave when I come up to town," she said to herself. Luckily, just as the situation was becoming unbearable, and her respectability on the verge of collapsing in the cause of peace, they stopped at the gate of The Elms, Raymond Avenue, Lewisham. Bertie's annoyance was swallowed up in the double anxiety of introducing her to his family and his family to her. On both counts he felt a little gloomy, for he did not think much of his mother and sister and did not expect Joanna to think much of them. At the same time there was no denying that Jo was and looked a good bit older than he, and his mother and sister were quite capable of thinking he was marrying her for her money. She was looking rather worn and dragged this afternoon, after her unaccustomed railway journey--sometimes you really wouldn't take her for more than thirty, but to-day she was looking her full age. "Mother--Agatha--this is Jo." Joanna swooped down on the old lady with a loud kiss. "Pleased to meet you," said Mrs. Hill in a subdued voice. She was very short and small and frail-looking, and wore a cap--for the same reason no doubt that she kept an aspidistra in the dining-room window, went to church at eleven o'clock on Sundays, and had given birth to Agatha and Albert. Agatha was evidently within a year or two of her brother's age, and she had his large, melting eyes, and his hair that sprang in a dark semicircle from a low forehead. She was most elegantly dressed in a peek-a-boo blouse, hobble skirt, and high-heeled shoes. "Pleased to meet you," she said, and Joanna kissed her too. "Is tea ready?" asked Bertie. "It will be in a minute, dear--I can hear Her getting it."