But with Ursula he behaved truculently. Till she longed for peace and solitude and the room, as a stale soul longs for adventure. Ursula was fully awake to the girl’s infatuation for a being of heroic stature who had for the moment become identified with Doug. She knew, too, that Chris believed it to be her own white-walled secret, and that she was pluckily determined neither herself nor Doug should guess it. Happiness enough to hug it close ... ah, always and again, lucky Chris! And Ursula knew that Doug believed his wife unsuspicious of the Real Thing which had come into his life, and of his impending renunciation. She knew that unless suddenly and with a light word she pierced it through, Doug would keep up the stalwart pretence of being cured, more from vanity than from consideration for Ursula’s broken heart--“he broke it often and cheerily enough over Doreen and Co!” Ursula’s unspoken thrusts towards Doug were audacious and without pity ... her eyes were naked of love, and only recently naked; a man stands least chance at such a time. A week’s hard rain and storm shut them up together, a trio of two deluded and one wise, in Grey Stone. Mr. Wenn discovered some technical flaw in the cess-pit, and digging it down again to its original depth, floated about on a raft in a six-foot square of water at the bottom, “like a St. Miniotish Peter Pan,” Ursula said. If any of them passed down that part of the garden, and looked over the edge of the pit, Wenn’s formidable list of the improvements he was effecting on the property, shouted up, threatened unmistakably that this was going to cost the Barrisons “good money.” Doug could be with difficulty restrained from emptying buckets of dirty water into the cess-pit, in deliberate forgetfulness of Mr. Wenn’s navigations therein. “He’m nothin’ but a gurt boy at heart,” said Mrs. Endellion leniently. But Mrs. Endellion had to leave them, and her comfortable presence in the home had been replaced by Genesis Mitch, usually called Cissy. Cissy was a good girl, meek and slightly idiotic and fervently devoted to her master and mistress. She had no chin and humble devoted eyes. Louis Gregson, who during these dull and dripping days visited Grey Stone fairly often, named her “the Wordsworth child”: “Wordsworth was meeting that type of child all over the place, wherever he went; it seems a pity he should be dead, and your Cissy wasted. “‘A gentle child was Cissy Mitch, The fourth of twenty-two, Her mother’s head, alas, was weak, Her father wanting, too!’” Ursula laughed. She had learnt “Lucy Grey” and “We are Seven” while at Miss Luther’s.