This the Professor caught, vaguely. What he did not catch was the sudden, still alertness into which there seemed to spring the whole body of the girl behind him. She was "aware" from head to foot; her white throat seemed to stretch, her whole being to strain; listening. The footsteps passed, the husky charming laugh of the one, the loud confident voice of the other.... Life relaxed again in Olwen; mechanically her hands began sorting papers. No; the Professor had not noticed, her male relatives being avowedly the worst observers of a girl's psychology ... even had he seen, he probably would not have guessed which of the two young men who had gone by was responsible for that sudden transitory illumination of his niece's face; whether it was the black-eyed Staff Captain who had lost an arm, or the blonde R.F.C. pilot who had been shot down last April.... Well, they'd both gone now; nothing more of them to be seen until the _déjeuner_.... Olwen dragged her eyes back to the disorder of the writing-table; she tossed up her head with a rather forced sprightliness, and laughed. "_What_ a mess! Worse than ever, and I'd put everything so beautifully tidy last night! You _are_ dreadful!" "Never mind, Olwen _fach_," he said, with a hand on her shoulder. "There won't be much work done this morning. I'm going into the woods. Just hand me my specimen-case ... ah, here. And file the June numbers of that Danish magazine--where on earth did I put 'em?--ah, there. Then there are a couple of letters to copy into the book, and that's all. You can come on and find me; I shall be where we went yesterday with Mrs. Cartwright and that young What's-his-name, the flying officer." He set aside the two letters to be copied, planting upon them, as a paper weight, one of the enormous pine-cones that he had picked up in the forest. Then he slung on his specimen-case, took up his indented grey hat, smiled and nodded to the girlish figure at the table, and went out. Olwen, left alone, stretched her arms over her head. "_Oh!_" she sighed, desperately. She moved the jar of arbutus into place again; picked out a spray, dark-leafed, berried with scarlet and orange, tried it against the dull serge of her frock. Then she tilted her chair back so that she could just see herself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. It showed her a forlorn little face. "He'd never _look_ at me, I know," she told herself. She thrust the spray of arbutus back into water and turned to her work listlessly enough. * * * * * Half an hour later the listlessness had finished. A miracle had begun to work! For the Professor's niece and secretary was pouring breathlessly over a letter that she had found on the table under a file of notes for J. Howel-Jones's great work on Agarics. With shining credulous eyes she turned from that typewritten letter to the little packet that had been enclosed in it. Then she turned to the letter again. She read: