‘Well, you know us now, at all events,’ says Carew very happily, with the light and ready manner that belongs to all large families. His tone is a little shy, perhaps—the tone of the boy to the lovely girl, when first love’s young dream dawns upon him; but Susan and Ella take the joke very kindly, and the laughter that follows on it clears the atmosphere. ‘You are Mr. Wyndham’s tenant, aren’t you?’ says Susan. ‘Yes, now’—in a glad and eager voice—‘though at first I wasn’t.’ She pauses here, drawing back, as it were. Has she said too much? Susan, however, has evidently seen nothing in the small admission. ‘I like Mr. Wyndham,’ says she. ‘We all do, indeed. What we are afraid of now is that, as you have the Cottage, we shan’t see so much of him. But perhaps’—gaily—‘you will put him up sometimes, and then we can renew our acquaintance with him.’ Here Carew turns an awful crimson, and casts a glance, meant to annihilate, upon the innocent Susan. ‘I don’t know; I’m not sure,’ says Ella dejectedly. Evidently she has seen as little in Susan’s suggestion as Susan herself. ‘He has only been here once since I came, and Mrs. Denis seems to think he won’t come very often. I wish he would come, and I’m glad you like him, because I like him too.’ Carew here begins to wonder if he ever had liked Wyndham, and on the whole thinks not. Ella has taken a step towards Susan. ‘What is your name?’ asks she timidly, but very sweetly. ‘Susan Barry.’ ‘That sounds like the beginning of the Catechism,’ says Carew, who is, as we know, a clergyman’s son, and therefore up to little points like this. ‘I knew it,’ says Ella, still very shyly, to Susan—‘I knew it in a way. Mrs. Denis told me. But I wanted to be quite sure. You are Miss Barry?’ ‘Oh no; only Susan,’ says the pretty proprietor of that name. ‘My aunt is Miss Barry. But I hope you will call me Susan. It is’—mournfully—‘a dreadfully ugly name, isn’t it?’ ‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’ ‘I hope you will like mine,’ says Carew, breaking into the conversation. ‘It is Carew. Susan and the others call it Crew, but that’s an abbreviation of me to which I object. But your name,’ says he. ‘We should like to know that.’ Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given her to believe that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she knows nothing. ‘My name is Ella,’ says she, in a miserable tone. ‘Call me that if—you will.’