‘That is settled then,’ says Crosby quickly. Had he feared she would go on to say something more—to say that she had an engagement? ‘I will call for you at twelve.’ ‘Oh no,’ says Susan. ‘I’—confusedly—‘I can walk up. It—it is too much trouble.’ ‘George doesn’t think so,’ says Lady Forster, with a faint grimace. ‘Is this your brother?’ She bends in her quick way, and turns up Bonnie’s beautiful little face and looks at it earnestly. ‘What a face!’ cries she. ‘Is everyone beautiful down here? I shall come and live here, George—no use in your putting me off! I’m determined. It is a promise, then’—to Susan, smiling vivaciously—‘that you will come to-morrow, and another day. We must arrange another day—you will bring me up this small Adonis,’ patting Bonnie’s cheek as he smiles at her (children love all things pretty) ‘to see me?’ ‘I shall be very glad,’ says Susan tremulously. Then Lady Forster trips away to rejoin her friends, who are standing beside the different carriages, and quarrelling gaily as to who shall go home with whom, and for a second Crosby is alone with Susan. ‘You said it was a promise.’ ‘Yes,’ says Susan, ‘but—I have not known any very—very—’ ‘Smart folk,’ says Crosby, laughing. ‘Well, you’ll know them to-morrow, and I expect you’ll be surprised how very little smart they are.’ ‘But—’ ‘There shan’t be a “but” in the world.’ ‘It is only this’—miserably—‘that I shall be shy, and—’ ‘Not a bit of it. And even if you are’—he looks at her—‘you may depend on me. I’ll pull you through. But don’t be too shy, Susan. Extremes are attractive things—fatally attractive sometimes.’ He pauses. ‘Well, so much for the shyness, but what did your “and” mean?’ ‘It meant,’ says Susan, with deep depression, ‘that they will all hate me.’ ‘I almost wish I could believe that.’ He laughs again as he says this, and gives Bonnie’s ear a pinch, and follows his sister. Two minutes later, as Susan rejoins her own people at the little gate that leads by a short-cut to the Rectory, she sees him again, talking gaily, and handing into one of the carriages a tall and very handsome girl, dressed as Susan had never seen anyone dressed in all her life. It seems the very perfection of dressing. She lingers a moment—a bare moment—but it is long enough to see that he has seated himself beside the handsome girl, and that he is still laughing—but this time with her—over some reminiscence, as the carriage drives away. CHAPTER XXXVIII. ‘Anxiety is the poison of human life.’