“You’ve got the true Devonshire homing instinct,” he declared. “Devon folk who’ve left the country always want to see the ‘place where their people lived.’ I remember, about a year ago, a Canadian girl and her brother turned up at Staple. They were descendants of a Tormarin who had emigrated two or three generations before, and they had come across to England for a visit. Their first trip was to Devonshire; they wanted to see ‘the place where Dad’s people had lived.’ And, by Jove, they knew a lot more about it than we did! They were posted up in every detail, and insisted on a personally conducted tour over the whole place. They went back to Canada rejoicing, loaded with photographs of Staple.” Jean smiled. “I think it was rather dear of them to come back like that,” she said simply. They swung round the head of the lake and, as they turned, Jean caught sight of a woman’s figure emerging from the path which ran through the woods. Apparently the newcomer descried the skaters at the same moment, for she stopped and waved her hand in a friendly little gesture of greeting. Nick lifted his cap. “That is Lady Latimer,” he said. Something in his voice, some indescribable deepening of quality, made Jean look at him quickly. She remembered on one occasion, in a jeweller’s shop, noticing a very beautiful opal lying in its case; she had commented on it casually, and the man behind the counter had lifted it from its satiny bed and turned it so that the light should fall full upon it. In an instant the red fire slumbering in its heart had waked into glowing life, irradiating the whole stone with pulsing colour. It was some such vitalising change as this that she sensed in the suddenly eager face beside her. Hastening their pace, she and Nick skated up to the edge of the lake where Lady Latimer awaited them, and as he introduced the two women to each other it seemed as though the eyes of the woman on the bank asked hastily, almost frightenedly: “Will you prove friend or foe?” And Jean’s eyes, all soft and luminous like every real woman’s in the presence of love, signalled back steadily: “Friend!” “Claire!” said Nick. And Jean thought that no name could have suited her better. She was the slenderest thing, with about her the pliant, delicate grace of a harebell. Ash-blonde hair, so fair that in some lights it looked silver rather than gold, framed the charming Greuze face. Only it was not quite a Greuze, Jean reflected. There was too much character in it--a certain gentle firmness, something curiously still and patient in the closing of the curved lips, and a deeper appeal than that of mere wondering youth in the gentian-blue eyes. They were woman’s eyes, eyes out of which no weeping could quite wash the wistfulness of some past or present sorrow. “So you are one of the Charnwood Petersons?” said Lady Latimer in her soft, pretty voice. “You won’t like me, I’m afraid”--smiling--“I’m living in your old home.”