They had had visitors, at first. Before they were fairly settled in the place, a crowd of friends had descended on them, and Hamer Shaw would sooner have shut his door to a Royal honour than an old acquaintance. But the circle, so pleasant and suitable at Halsted, was altogether out of the picture at Watters. The very house itself would have nothing to say to the guests; indeed, it deliberately sulked at them with grudging fires and lukewarm baths. It had other tricks, too--sudden stairs down which they tumbled in the dark; rattling windows, creaking boards and whistling key-holes for the hag-ridden hours of the night; soot in spotless grates, burst pipes and skilfully situated coal-buckets; while the outside world co-operated subtly, from the early rooster to the midnight owl. These drawbacks had been unknown at Halsted, and the guests asked each other dismally what could have possessed old Hamer to quit his palace for a God-forsaken monument like Watters. Their torpedo-nosed cars had a kind of abnormality in the little village at the river’s edge. The Halsted habitués rent the night with gramophones, and across the cool water flung the frenzied parlance of snooker. They were Halstedites who had tangoed through a dream in the lane. Dandy found herself shrinking from them unintentionally but unmistakably. She was glad when they went; and yet, when they had gone, she was sorry, for she felt her place to be with them. And the friends bemoaned themselves as they motored home, saying sadly--“That’s the end of _you_, Hamer, old man! In another year he’ll have forgotten he ever knew us. It’s the country does it--the benighted, besotted, be-swank-ridden country. Give him six months more, and he’ll be as rooted an old tree-stump as any of them!” It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Dandy realised that thankfully. The hosts had been kind as usual, the guests hearty as ever, but the new conditions had laughed the old friendships to scorn. It was very sad, and it was also rather terrible, if you were once fully convinced that a house, a senseless mixture of stone and mortar, had done it all on its own! Thus Dandy held review as she sat with her feet on the rungs of the high stool. Later in the day, on a sudden impulse, she unburdened her mind to her parents. “It’s going to be a bit hard for me,” she said frankly, “so you must not be disappointed if I’m a failure! I don’t match here, and I’ve lost my old element, so at present I’m neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I’ll have to grow to this place, and that sort of thing takes time. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy; it’s only that I don’t fit in. _You’re_ all right, aren’t you, mummy? You touched ground over the Bluecaster butcher with the Halsted smile. And father’s been all right all along. It doesn’t seem fair that I should still be struggling in deep water.” Mrs. Shaw said--“6 tr., 3 lacets, 1 sp., 31 tr.--have you seen the new stair-rods?--4 sl. sts. from third horizontal tr., turn!”