A slender figure is inside it—a figure flung miserably into one of the corners, and crying perhaps, after all, more angrily than painfully. ‘Now, what on earth are you doing that for?’ says Crosby. He seats himself on the rustic bench beside her, and places Bonnie on her knee. It seems to him that that will be the best way to bring down her hands from her eyes. And he is not altogether wrong. It is impossible to let her little beloved one fall off her knees, so quickly, if reluctantly, she brings down her right hand so as to clasp him securely. ‘What are you crying about?’ goes on Crosby, very proud of the success of his first manœuvre. ‘Because somebody wanted to kiss you? You will have a good deal of crying at that rate, Susan, before you come to the end of your life.’ He is laughing a little now, and as Bonnie has climbed up on her knees, and is pulling away the other hand from her face, Susan feels she may as well make the best of a bad situation. ‘It wasn’t so much that,’ says she. ‘Though’—anxiously—‘Jacky exaggerated most dreadfully. As to my objecting to their teasing me about James McIlveagh—you have not seen him, or you would understand me better. It is not only that he is uninteresting, but that he is awful! His nose is like an elephant’s trunk, and his eyes are as small as the head of a pin. And his clothes—his trousers—I don’t know where he got his trousers, but Dom used to say his mother made them in her spare moments. Not that one would care about a person’s trousers, of course,’ says Susan, with intense earnestness, ‘if he was nice himself; but James wasn’t nice, and I was never more glad in my life than when he went away.’ ‘He’s coming back, however.’ ‘Yes, I know, and I’m sorry for it, if they are going to tease me all day long about him, as they are doing now. I think’—with a hasty glance at him, born of the fact that she knows her eyes are disfigured by crying—‘you might have tried to stop them.’ ‘Well, you see, I hardly knew what to do at first,’ says Crosby, quite entering into the argument. ‘And when I did, it was a little too late. Of course it seemed to me a very possible thing that you might have given your heart to this young man with the nose and the unfortunate trousers who is stewing in the Soudan.’ ‘You might have known by my manner that I hated them to tease me about him,’ says Susan, very little appeased by his apology. ‘I’ll know better next time,’ says Crosby humbly. ‘But when I heard he had been following you about like a baa-lamb, and that you had taken that anchor from him, and that he used to—’ He is checked by a flash from Susan’s eyes. There is a pause. Then suddenly she presses her face into Bonnie’s flaxen hair, and bursts into smothered laughter.