Nor, though he loved flowers, of the horticulturist, though the broad garden was a patchwork of colour and the fragrance of cabbage roses came to delight his senses. Nor was it the air of comfort and cleanliness that pervaded the place, the scrubbed red-brick pathway that led to the door, the spotless curtains behind leaded panes. It was the girl, in the red-lined basket chair, that arrested his gaze. She sat on a little lawn in the shade of a mulberry tree, with her shapely young limbs stiffly extended, a book in her hand, a large box of chocolates by her side. Her hair, the colour of old gold, an old gold that held life and sheen; a flawless complexion, and, when she turned her head in his direction, a pair of grave, questioning eyes, deeper than grey, yet greyer than blue. . . . She drew up her feet hurriedly and rose. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,”—Dick, hat in hand, smiled his apology—“but I want water for my poor little Lizzie. She’s developed a prodigious thirst.” She frowned for a second, and then laughed. “Lizzie—you mean a car? If you’ll come to the back of the cottage I’ll show you where the well is.” He followed, wondering who she was. The tiny hint of patronage in her tone he understood. It was the tone of matured girlhood addressing a boy of her own age. Dick, who was thirty and looked eighteen, with his smooth, boyish face, had been greeted in that “little boy” tone before, and was inwardly amused. “Here is the bucket and that is the well,” she pointed. “I would send a maid to help you, only we haven’t a maid, and never had a maid, and I don’t think ever shall have a maid!” “Then some maid has missed a very good job,” said Dick, “for this garden is delightful.” She neither agreed nor dissented. Perhaps she regretted the familiarity she had shown. She conveyed to him an impression of aloofness, as she watched the process of filling the buckets, and when he carried them to the car on the road outside, she followed. “I thought it was a—a—what did you call it—Lizzie?” “She is Lizzie to me,” said Dick stoutly as he filled the radiator of the big Rolls, “and she will never be anything else. There are people who think she should be called ‘Diana,’ but those high-flown names never had any attraction for me. She is Liz—and will always be Liz.” She walked round the machine, examining it curiously. “Aren’t you afraid to be driving a big car like that?” she asked. “I should be scared to death. It is so tremendous and . . . and unmanageable.” Dick paused with a bucket in hand. “Fear,” he boasted, “is a word which I have expunged from the bright lexicon of my youth.” For a second puzzled, she began to laugh softly. “Did you come by way of Welford?” she asked. He nodded. “I wonder if you saw my father on the road?” “I saw nobody on the road except a sour-looking gentleman of middle age who was breaking the Sabbath by carrying a large brown box on his back.” “Where did you pass him?” she asked, interested.