"Oh, you----!" he began, and he paused for a minute. "Oh, come," he said, "you are an awful nice little girl, you know. Anybody might be excused for losing his head. You were looking extra pretty at the party tonight, too. Some _peach_, you looked, if I may say so; and it wasn't just looks either. There was _something_ about you. Sort of disturbing.... I swear there was. You attracted me till I----" "Don't propose to me again," Olwen warned him. "I might think better of it." "Oh, no," laughed Harold Ellerton. "You're an absolute little sportswoman, I know." The little sportswoman, while she continued to laugh and chat with him in the friendliest way until the signal sounded for the train to start again, the little sportswoman had been really arrested by one of his remarks. "_Something about her_" tonight, he thought. She'd heard something like that before. She thought she might know what it meant. She went back to early on the afternoon of that eventful day. * * * * * Very late she had found herself as she was dressing for her tea with Mr. Brown at the Regent Palace; even as she was putting on her nicest silk stockings she had known that it would mean a scamper down the drive if she meant to catch that train.... Then in her hurry a suspender had snapped. "Dash!" she had cried. No time to stitch it. She had cast round for the nearest bit of ribbon wherewith to garter herself securely, and had snatched it up from where it dangled on her dressing-table, hardly seeing which bit of pink ribbon it was with what satin sachet attached. She'd wound it hastily about her slim and silk-sheathed leg and forgotten all about it. That's how she had come to be wearing it that evening, not in the orthodox way round her neck, but wearing it nevertheless; the Disturbing Charm! Hidden thus, it almost seemed as if it had done its work again? * * * * * As they said good-bye at the wicket gate of her Aunt's house, she found herself quite affectionately promising to write, while on leave, to this young sailor who never would be anything but a friend to her. She found herself submitting quite naturally to one of those flavourless and definite kisses on the cheek, of which the entirely brotherly quality can never be mistaken by the recipient. A looker-on may be more easily mistaken. Olwen's Aunt Lizzie was coming up the Drive behind her, having been delayed in another carriage of that very same train, since she had also been dining in town. From some distance she had observed the farewell at the gate. But she exchanged greetings, quite unprejudiced, with the young sailor who passed her. She was a modern Aunt.... At the house she found her niece already in the bedroom, so busy with her little straw work-basket and two lengths of pink ribbon, that before any talk even of the raid, she asked, "What have you got there, Olwen?"