The summer holidays came and went, eight cloudless weeks of them. Clare loved the sun; was well content to be out, day after day, cushioned and replete, on the sunniest strip of sand in the sunniest corner of a parched and gasping England. She found it wonderfully soothing to listen with shut eyes to the purr of the sea and the distant cries of gulls and children, with Alwynne to fan her and shade her, and clamber up and down two hundred feet of red cliff for her when the corkscrew was forgotten, or the salt, or Clare's bathing-dress, or a half-read magazine. Clare grew brown and plump as the drowsy days went by. Alwynne grew brown, too, but she certainly did not grow plumper. But then the heat never suited Alwynne. She had often said so, as she reminded Elsbeth. For, when Alwynne came back to her for the three weeks at home that she had persuaded Clare were due to Elsbeth, Elsbeth was difficult to satisfy. Elsbeth was inclined to be indignant. What sort of a holiday had it been, if Alwynne could come back so thin, and tired, and colourless under her tan? What had Miss Hartill been about to allow it? But Alwynne's account of their pleasant lazy days was certainly appeasing.... It must have been the heat.... Not even the most suspicious of aunts could conscientiously suspect Clare of having anything to do with it.... Wait till September came, with its cooling skies.... Alwynne would be better then. In the meantime Elsbeth tried what care and cookery and coddling could do, and Alwynne submitted more patiently than usual. Alwynne, indeed, was unusually gentle with Elsbeth in the three weeks they spent together before the autumn term began. She was always good to Elsbeth, considerate of her bodily comforts, lovingly demonstrative. But Clare had taught Alwynne very carefully that she was growing up at last, becoming financially and morally independent, free to lead her own life, that if she stayed with Elsbeth it was by favour, not by duty. And Alwynne, immensely flattered by the picture of herself as a woman of the world, had lived up to it with her usual drastic enthusiasm. Elsbeth, not unused to disillusionment and hopes deferred, could sigh and smile and acquiesce, knowing it for the phase that it was and forgiving Alwynne in advance. But Clare, who owed her neither gratitude nor duty, she never forgave. She was a very human woman, for all her saintliness.