“I’m so glad,” said Toppie. She gazed at Alix for a long moment, as though forgetting that she held the vase; then, looking round her, vague in her absorption, she set it down on a table and held out her hand. The water from the vase had spilled over it, and as it closed on Alix’s it made her think of the hand of a dryad, a naiad, or some chill, unearthly creature. “Yes; in towers,” she thought, as Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her. “And how much she loved him!” She saw then that Giles was there. He was stretched out in a deep chair on one side of the fire, his hands clasped behind his head, and he was watching Toppie; her meeting with Toppie. “And how much Giles loves her!” came the further thought, sharp with its sense of sudden elucidation. If he sat there, in that rather mannerless fashion, not helping with the water-cans, the baskets of flowers, the scissors, it was because he loved her and wanted to watch her. Toppie, still with her absorption, had picked up the vase again and carried it to a far table. “There; that’s the best we can do with the garden just now,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling at her. “And without you, Toppie, I’d never have made the effort. Toppie thinks a room without flowers so sad. She made me come out with her and pick all these. It’s astonishing, really, what one can still find in a November garden.” “They look awfully nice,” said Giles. “Well, to tell you the truth,” said Ruth—Alix had already noted of her that, on all occasions, she gave her opinion without being asked—“they look to me rather dingy and frost-bitten. Rather a waste of time, I think, all this messing about to arrange flowers that don’t exist!”—and Ruth laughed, pleased with her own good sense, and went to seat herself on the arm of Giles’s chair. “She bores him; but he would not like to say it,” thought Alix, seeing Giles’s kind but unwelcoming look. She had a feeling of excitement, yet of oppression. Toppie, she knew, was thinking of nothing but her. The tea-table stood before the sofa on the other side of the fire from Giles, and Mrs. Bradley sat down to it and Toppie came beside her, and then, looking up at Alix, laying her hand on the place still vacant, said “Come here, Alix.” “There’s room for me, too,” cried Rosemary, plunging down between them. “My place is always near the cake!” But Toppie looked at her quite coldly and said: “There’s not room for you, Rosemary. Somewhere else, please. You make us all uncomfortable.” She was very fair, with a skin that would have been of a milky whiteness had it not been thickly freckled. Her lips were small and pale, her chin long and narrow; all her head, bound round with the black ribbon, was singularly narrow, and that, perhaps, was why her grey eyes seemed to look out from towers. “And how she has suffered!” thought Alix.