Then, as he came round the corner, he saw that the person to whom Laura was speaking was not a gardener, but Oliver Tropenell himself--Oliver, with a spud in his hand, kneeling before Laura, a basket of bulbs by his side. He was looking up eagerly--a jealous onlooker might have said ardently--into her face. In fact, Tropenell looked, so Godfrey Pavely told himself with some heat, "damned absurd." But before Godfrey came right upon the three of them--for little Alice was flitting about behind her mother--Oliver stood up, with the words, "Then I'd better go and get those other bulbs, hadn't I? Will you come too, Alice?" Godfrey called out "Hullo! Doing some planting?" But his voice sounded odd to himself. Not so, however, to the others. Laura was honestly unaware that Godfrey was very much earlier than his wont, or, if aware, she did not attach any importance to the fact. Still, she felt afraid that Godfrey would interfere with her gardening scheme, and so she shook her head. As for Oliver Tropenell, no one looking at his dark, set face could have guessed his thoughts. As a matter of fact, he had heard Pavely's footsteps some moments before Pavely spoke. And he had wondered, with quick irritation, why he had come back from Pewsbury--or Rosedean--so much earlier than usual. Alice, dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, quite curiously unlike either her father or her mother, was the only one of the four who was still happily at ease. She ran up to her father: "Come and see _my_ garden, father!" she cried. "I'm growing some mustard and cress specially for you. You can take it to the Bank in an envelope and have some for your tea!" The little girl was aware, deep in her sensitive, affectionate heart, that her father and mother were not quite like other fathers and mothers. They were not cosily loving together, as were the father and mother of the two little girls with whom she sometimes went to tea in Pewsbury, neither were they on the happy terms of easy comradeship which even Alice knew was usual with other children's parents. But she loved her mother with a passionate, unswerving, admiring love, and her father with a stout, proprietary affection. For his sake, and his sake only, she would have liked to be a boy, for then, so she argued secretly within herself, she could be his office boy at the Bank. Up to now she had felt for Oliver Tropenell the easy, unquestioning liking children give to one who comes and goes. But lately she had become dimly aware that occasionally her mother and Mr. Tropenell were too busy talking together to take much heed of her, and this threw a little shadow across her heart.