But there had been June evenings when Onoria had letters to write, or was playing over new sets of pieces with a view to her profession, when Elsie slipped out of the long French window on to the lawn to water the flowers, and found that Peter was watering his. Peter joined her on these occasions and they hunted for slugs together with an effortless ardour rarely obtained upon their separate quests. Sometimes they combined with desperate loyalty to try to save Onoria an exertion that they could not persuade her to give up, or planned to appease her with a suitable birthday present. Their talk was full of Onoria. They quoted her most strident sayings with bursts of nervous laughter; they bulwarked their own opinions with the justice of her utterances; and sometimes with bated breath they confessed to each other the little difficulties which arose on their domestic hearths, when these hearths were confronted with Onoria. Mr. Gubbins had a housekeeper who hated Onoria and was herself a redoubtable woman. Elsie’s family sometimes stood up and raged against her intimacy with Onoria; they even curtailed it to music lesson days and Sundays. They couldn’t quite destroy it because the most authoritative of families would shrink from forbidding one of its daughters from visiting a very respectable, middle-aged lady, who had been her music teacher since she was a child. “I said,” Elsie explained breathlessly behind the rhododendron bushes, “if you stop me going to see Miss Strickland, I’ll tell the Vicar and Miss Bretherton. You know Father thinks the world of the Vicar since we’ve stopped going to Chapel; he’s Onoria’s second cousin too; and no one would like to have Miss Bretherton down on them, not even Mother—so they just glared. Glaring’s awful, of course, still it can’t do you any real harm.” “No,” Mr. Gubbins murmured with a long sigh of regret. “It’s not as if your parents _cooked_ for you! If Mrs. Binns has been crossed, and whenever she sees Onoria she seems to get crossed, she pours pepper into everything I eat! And as I’ve often told you, I have a very delicate throat!” Elsie looked uneasily over the tobacco plant they were spraying. Onoria had laughed so hard and so long upon the subject of Mr. Gubbins’ throat that it seemed to Elsie a disloyalty to let him talk about it. What he was afraid of was cancer. He had an enlarged tonsil. Mr. Gubbins could (as Onoria pointed out to him several times during the course of the winter when he was always catching colds) have it taken out. But Mr. Gubbins did not think it was bad enough for this heroic remedy; it was only bad enough to give rise occasionally to the question of whether the doctor really knew what he was talking about in assigning to a pain so severe a cause so insufficiently lurid.