Mrs. O’Gorman cheered me up. “It’s likely it’s nothing at all,” she said. “Just a passing storm, even if that. Very few of the romances of seventeen persist. I was like that myself: my heart was broken a dozen times before I was Rose’s age, and at eighteen I seriously meditated suicide because my violin teacher was married. It was in Dublin. I remember to this hour the smell of the Liffey that came up to me as I leaned over Carlisle Bridge one evening coming back from a lesson, and pretended I wanted to drown myself and all my grief. No one could have entered such water as that! And ten days later I had forgotten all about the fiddler, and was inventing a novel with me the heroine and the hero an actor at the theatre that week, who didn’t even know of my existence. Maybe Rose will be like that. Don’t worry.” Rose had only two more terms, and as she spent most of the Easter holidays with a school-fellow, she did not meet Ronnie. During the few days she was with me she seemed to be heart-whole; certainly there was no suggestion of blighted affection, for her spirits were of the highest. So Mrs. O’Gorman, I assumed, was right again. * * * * * It was just before Rose’s return from school for ever, in the summer, that I had an unexpected visit from Mrs. Stratton, in the character of the solicitous aunt. She arrived in the forenoon, and while doing justice to lunch unfolded her purpose. Briefly it was to renew the attack begun eleven years earlier, only now with perhaps more reasonableness. My unpardonable offence was still the same—celibacy, but it had assumed an increased gravity. To be a bachelor of thirty-four in charge of a child of seven was deplorable enough; but to be a bachelor of forty-five in charge of a girl of eighteen was heinous. It was thus that her nasty mind worked. And not only hers but, she assured me, countless other persons’. In fact, I gathered from her remarks that the unsuitability of my household was the only theme with which, in a few days’ time, the world would be occupied. “This morbid interest in my affairs is very disgusting,” I said. Mrs. Stratton admitted it; but how could I deny that some handle was being given? “You two alone here.” “Well, I do deny it, absolutely,” I said. “Don’t you all know the conditions of the will? Don’t you know that Rose is in my care until she is twenty—that is to say, for two more years—entrusted to me by her father, to act as a father in his place? It is monstrous to suggest that I am not worthy of that confidence.” “But I am not suggesting that,” Mrs. Stratton replied indignantly. “Of course you are,” I said. “The mere fact that you come here and put these ideas into my head is tantamount to a charge, an indictment.” “I don’t mean that,” she protested.