“Over by the door. With grandfather and an aunt. They came about three weeks before we left.” “Did they?” Doug had been absorbed by Doreen then. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, if this Christine of yours is to be solemnly applied like a thermometer to my temperature----” “Don’t be a goose, Doug”--lightly. Unsuspicious, he kissed her and departed to work. Ursula wrote her letter. And then went up to the room above the cabin; down three solid but uneven stairs that cut it off from the rest of the cottage.... The door was thick, too. Beyond it, loneliness could come true. It had amused Ursula to furnish the room as much as possible like the one she had lost to Aunt Lavvy, only in creamy white--walls, bed, hangings. But the two windows were full of sea in the daytime; and the lamp had a round silk shade, rich gold as an October moon. The floor was covered by a rug of some animal with coarse white fur. “I’d have liked it ...” murmured Ursula. She sat down on the edge of the bed ... then saw herself merely preparing to be wistful, and hastily went for a tramp into St. Miniot, to see Miss Gregson, now established with her barely-tolerated Eye-talian at Parc Gooth. Her brother Louis was staying with her; a short, ugly, dandified man. Ursula disliked his clipped black moustache which lay too high above his lips; disliked his deliberately experienced glance at her; disliked his sophisticated conversation, which held such gems as: “All women want until they cease to want, and then they want more!” When she departed, he said with affected abruptness: “When we meet again--we must talk together.” [III] CHRISTINE POWYS wrote: “May I really, really come next week already? May I? Oh, it is jolly decent of you. This place is like hell in summer--it stinks of cats. Only we can’t afford to get away. Yesterday I was so fed up with it that I picked the green paint blisters off the front door like I used to when I was about four....” They met her at Gullick with Champion’s car. She wore a very woolly white sweater and cap, and short plaid skirt, and had dabbed her mouth with incongruous scarlet--“Sweater to show us she knows how to dress for the sea--poor hot child! skirt, the plaid of no clan that was ever invented. Lip-salve? Subconscious tribute to Doug already.... I wonder?” But on second thoughts Ursula decided it was probably because Christine’s greatest pal at the boarding-house was just then using lip-salve--“she’ll leave it off after she’s been with me twenty-four hours, and take to some of my tricks instead.”