Her features and figure seemed to have altered as much as her hair. The lean, disjointed look of sixteen had given place to nineteen’s curves of incipient womanhood; the curves were not pronounced but they were curves. George liked curves. Her face was curiously like Cynthia’s and curiously unlike. She had her sister’s wide forehead and straight nose, and the corners of her lips were touched with the same sense of humour, but there was an elfin look about her that was quite different from Cynthia’s air of rather amused repose. Looking more closely still, George could see that, after all, this was the person who had brought him low with a hose-pipe, but her methods, he felt, had probably developed with her curves. She would use subtler means now, but she would no doubt attain the same results. George shivered slightly. “Footprints!” Alan’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Oo!”? “Did the girl leave footprints, too?” Monica asked eagerly, with her sex’s immediate conversion of the general into the personal. Just over two years ago she would also have said only: “Footprints! Oo!” Guy and Mr. Doyle exchanged glances. The glances said quite plainly: “I think we shall be able to find use for this young man.” The talk proceeded. In due course George rose, went out of the room, returned with drinks and dispensed them. Still the talk went on. At last Guy suggested that it was time to make a move. George did not contradict him. George was a courteous host, but there are limits. Hose-pipes are one, frogs another. “What are you doing to-morrow, George?” Guy asked as he rose. “Got to go over to Manstead to fetch the car,” said George, not quite so dolefully. There had been a ring in Guy’s question, and George was not sorry to have a sound excuse against whatever the ring might portend. “It’s between thirty and forty miles from here. Take me most of the morning.” “Oh, are you going to drive forty miles to-morrow morning?” asked Monica instantly. “Oh, George, how gorgeous! You’ll take me with you, won’t you?” “Um!” gulped George. “Er—yes, oh, yes. Er—rather. If—if you’re sure you’d really like to come. It’ll be a beastly journey, you know,” he added hopefully. “Thanks awfully,” said Monica, promptly extinguishing the hope. “I’d love it.” George contemplated his feet with a moody air. He had, he now realised, been quite mistaken about that trip to Manstead; he hadn’t disliked the thought of it at all, he had actually been looking forward to it intensely. It had promised a whole morning’s peace, away from everything that was making life so bleak at present. Now life was apparently to be bleaker still. Probably Monica would fill the petrol-tank up with water and the radiator with petrol, or stick pins into the tyres, or scratch her initials on the paint; at the very least she would wilfully misdirect him on the road, in order to get a sixty-mile joy-ride instead of a thirty-five. He meditated dismally.