Annette was well again, if so dull and tame a word can be used to describe the radiance which health had shed upon her, and upon the unfolding, petal by petal, of her beauty. The long rest, the slow recovery, the immense peace which had enfolded her life for the first time, the grim, tender "mothering" of Mrs. Stoddart, had all together fostered and sustained her. Her life, cut back to its very root by a sharp frost, had put out a superb new shoot. Her coltishness and a certain heavy, naïve immaturity had fallen from her. Her beauty had shaken them off and stood clear of them, and Mrs. Stoddart recognized, not without anxiety, that the beauty which was now revealed was great. But in the process of her unduly delayed and then unduly forced development it was plain that she had lost one thing which would have made her mother's heart ache if she had been alive. Annette had lost her youth. She was barely twenty-two, but she had the dignity and the bearing of a woman of thirty. Mrs. Stoddart watched her standing, a gracious slender figure in her white gown under the paradise tree, with a wild baby-canary in the hollow of her hands, coaxing it to fly back to its parents, calling shrilly to it from a neighbouring thicket of lemon-coloured honeysuckle. She realized the pitfalls that lie in wait for persons as simple and as inapprehensive as Annette, especially when they are beautiful as well, and she sighed. Presently the baby-canary fluttered into the honeysuckle, and Annette walked down the steep garden path to meet Victor the butler, who could be seen in the distance coming slowly on the donkey up the white high road from Santa Cruz, with the letters.