Why did the girl stare at her so? Why, Joan wondered? A strange, elfin-like child, a bud on the point of bursting into a wondrous beauty, Joan realised, and realised too that there was enmity in the dark eyes that stared at her so mercilessly. “Ellice, child, go out into the garden,” Helen said presently. “Come with me, we will leave Connie and Joan to have a little talk. Come, there are lots of things to see. This is a wonderful garden, you know—far, far better than Buddesby.” “It isn’t,” Ellice said quietly. “There’s no garden in the world like Buddesby garden, and no place in the world like Buddesby, but I will come with you if you want me to.” “A strange girl!” Joan said. “A very dear, good, lovable, but passionate child,” Connie said. “Now let us talk of you and Johnny, Joan, of the future. Helen has told you that—that she—” “She wishes to leave us soon? Yes.” “And so,” Connie slipped her hand into Joan’s, “the marriage need not be long delayed.” “Whenever—he wishes it,” Joan said, and for her life she could not put any warmth into her voice, and Connie, who noticed most things, noticed the chill coldness of it. “And yet she must love Johnny, or she would not marry him,” Connie thought. “I leave everything to you, and to Helen and to him.” It seemed almost as if Joan had a strange disinclination to utter Johnny’s name. Johnny sounded so babyish, so childlike, so affectionate, yet she felt that she could not speak of him as “John.” It would sound hard and crude in the ears of those who loved him, and called him by the more tender name. It was another shock to Connie later when Johnny came. She watched for the greeting between these two, and felt shocked and startled when Johnny took Joan’s hand and held it for a moment, then lifted it to his lips. No other kiss passed between them. And Connie felt her own cheeks burning, and wondered why. How strange! Lovers, and particularly accepted lovers, always kissed! There was that about Johnny that for the first time in her life almost irritated Connie. She watched him, and saw that his eyes were following Joan with that look of strange, dog-like devotion that Connie remembered with a start she had herself surprised in Ellice’s eyes before now. And as she watched, so watched another, herself almost forgotten as she sat in a corner of the room. The big black eyes were on these two, drifting from the face of one to the face of the other, taking no heed, and no count of anything else but of these two affianced lovers. Very clearly and almost coldly Joan had expressed her own wishes.