Dolff, however, smoking a cigarette over his work--which in this case was an old French novel--saw the two figures in the garden, and threw aside his book with as much alacrity as if it had been Aristotle. He did not much care even for a French novel: literature of any kind was not his forte. And it was the afternoon, in which no man, nor woman either, has any call to work. It is going against the very rules of Providence to work between four and five o’clock, and you cannot disregard these laws with impunity. Nothing that is done between these hours is ever good. If it is reading, it runs out of your memory as fast as you put it in; if it is writing, it is so bad that next morning you tear the paper across and throw it into the fire. Dolff was deeply sensible of this penalty of untimely labor. He threw his book aside, picked up his cap, and went downstairs. A walk in the garden before tea, which was a refreshment his mother liked him to share, was exactly what was needed to keep him up to the mark. It is difficult to say how these things happen; but after Dolff joined the pair, Julia separated herself with an instinct which need not be defined. She found that two was company and three was none. She was a little impatient at the sight of her brother when he first appeared, but afterwards accepted the situation, and began to find that she had a great many things to distract her attention. She wanted to speak to the gardener. She wanted to see whether the snowdrops were appearing which grew in the grass under the trees. She wished to look how the primulas were coming on in the little conservatory. It was well, on the whole, that Dolff had appeared to leave her free, for she could not have allowed Janet to walk alone, and yet she had all these things to do. Dolff was not very great at conversation, as the reader may imagine; and it was very seldom that he had found a chance of talking to Janet alone, or so nearly alone as they were now. He began with the weather, as was natural. It had been very cold. That night he went to the ball he thought he should have been frozen walking home, coming out of the hot rooms after dancing all night. It was a beautiful moonlight night, indeed, as Miss Summerhayes remarked--but dreadfully cold. “I hope it was a nice ball?” said Janet. “Oh, yes; it was a nice enough ball, but I did not know very many people. I wish you had been there, Miss Summerhayes; but perhaps you don’t care for that sort of thing?” “Indeed I do,” said Janet. “I am very fond of dancing. At least, I used to be when I was in the way of it.” “I hope you are not out of the way of it now. We must have a dance at Christmas. I am sure you dance to perfection, Miss Summerhayes.” “Oh, no,” said Janet, with a laugh. “I don’t do anything to perfection, but I confess I am fond of dancing.” “And of music, too,” said the grateful Dolff. “I know you are--good music, not my sort. And yet you are so very kind as to play for me.”