She certainly had noticed the rose-wreathed and unsuitable elegance in which Miss Boundrish had graced the table at luncheon. How delightful it had been to see people trooping into the cool, shadowy dining-room in summer hats and frocks, a little flushed with sun, and to think of shivering unfortunates with frost-tipped noses lunching at home by electric light, in a pea-green atmosphere flavoured with soot and sulphur. Mrs. Boundrish's hat was not what her daughter called chic, but it harmonized with Mrs. Allonby's simplest, least attractive costume; yet Ermengarde wore the thing contentedly. She was so tired, and so glad to rest from the innumerable petty complexities of suburban life, and steep herself in beauty and calm forgetfulness. As she lay in the sunny stillness, she wondered how she had borne with it so long, and was amazed to remember that she had cared about hats and been wounded by Arthur's contempt for those five. He would not believe his eyes if he could see her sitting thus in contented, humdrum chat with buxom Mrs. Boundrish, a woman of little more social consideration than her own cook, with a thing on her head like an inverted dish-cover, made of straw and garnished with two pocket-handkerchiefs. "You may," the mother of Dorris--not classic Doris--apologized, "have thought me a little--ah--stiff last night; but the fact is," she added, suddenly confidential, "I took you for a foreigner." "Ah!" returned Ermengarde, as much as to say, "That explains all." "And, of course, in a place like this, one had to be so very particular." "Very." Ermengarde was wondering if the huge, bee-like insects plunging into the hearts of the quivering stocks were fireflies in their winter state--later, the thin man said they were humming-bird moths--and once more took a pencil and a little writing-block and began relating the perils of yesterday's donkey-ride to Charlie, while Miss Boundrish's mother, murmuring various platitudes, resumed her woollen crochet-work, till authoritatively summoned to some parental duty by the piercing voice of Dorris. One line had contrived to get itself written--"My darling boy, your poor old mother"--then the pencil slipped--it is wonderful how easily pencils do this out of doors--from her fingers to the gravelled path, and before she could decide if it were possible to pick it up without disturbing the comfortable posture in which some Good Samaritan--either M. Isidore or the thin man--had tucked her up in rugs, the letter-block fell off on the other side.