“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” the man said. “This way, Mr. Alston.” And now in the drawing-room Hugh was cooling his heels. Why this mystery? Where was Marjorie? Why didn’t his aunt come? Then someone came, the door opened. Into the room stepped a tall girl—a girl with the most beautiful face he thought he had ever seen in his life. She looked at him calmly and casually, and seemed to hesitate; and then behind her appeared Lady Linden, flushed, and evidently agitated. “There,” she said, “there, my dears—I have brought you together again, and now everything must be made quite all right! Joan, darling, here is your husband! Go to him, forgive him if there is aught to forgive. Ask forgiveness, child, in your turn, and then—then kiss and be friends, as husband and wife should be.” She beamed on them both, then swiftly retreated, and the door behind Joan Meredyth quickly closed. CHAPTER IV FACE TO FACE It was, Hugh Alston decided, the most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life and the coldest, or so it seemed to him. She was looking at him with cool questioning in her grey eyes, her lips drawn to a hard line. He saw her as she stood before him, and as he saw her now, so would he carry the memory of the picture she made in his mind for many a day to come—tall, perhaps a little taller than the average woman, tall by comparison with Marjorie Linden, brown of hair and grey of eye, with a disdainfully enquiring look about her. He was not a man who usually noticed a woman’s clothes, yet the picture impressed on his mind of this girl was a very complete one. She was wearing a dress that instinct told him was of some cheap material. She might have bought it ready-made, she might have made it herself, or some unskilled dressmaker might have turned it out cheaply. Poverty was the note it struck, her boots were small and neat, well-worn. Yes, poverty was the keynote to it all. It was she, womanlike, who broke the silence. “Well? I am waiting for some explanation of all the extraordinary things that have been said to me since I have been in this house. You, of course, heard what Lady Linden said as she left us?” “I heard,” he said. His cheeks turned red. Was ever a man in a worse position? The questioning grey eyes stared at him so coldly that he lost his head. He wanted to apologise, to explain, yet he knew that he could not explain. It was Marjorie who had brought him into this, but he must respect the girl’s secret, on which so much depended for her. “Please answer me,” Joan Meredyth said. “You heard Lady Linden advise us, you and myself, to make up a quarrel that has never taken place; you heard her—” She paused, a great flush suddenly stole over her face, adding enormously to her attractiveness, but quickly as it came, it went.