This was her instant definition of their timid attempts to form a separate relation. Onoria might not have been so astonished if she had been a quicker hand at reading the silences of others. But like most great talkers, she was apt to take for granted, unless directly contradicted, that some form of agreement had taken place. She did not realise that the silence which gives consent is only one out of many others far less accommodating. Neither Elsie nor Peter had ever openly disagreed with Onoria, but their souls had rebelled in a wordless determination—rather like that which precedes the back kick of a mule. They could not, for instance, see the harm of Peter Gubbins singing, to Elsie’s accompaniment, old Scotch ballads. Peter Gubbins had a great fancy for Scotch ballads, no knowledge of the dialect, and a tenor voice liable to those spasmodic interludes which sometimes take place upon a gramophone. Onoria had, not without justice, decided that he ought not to sing in public. She had put it to him perfectly plainly. “You only make a painful noise,” she had asserted, “disagreeable to listen to and bad for your weak throat, and you live in a semi-detached villa. The sooner you break yourself of a bad habit like this, the better!” Peter had broken himself of the habit, but he still indulged in occasional orgies which took place while Onoria was at school. He could only pick out the air with one finger on the piano by himself; and to his great delight Elsie agreed to accompany him. She arranged to come early to Onoria’s before school hours were over and meet Peter in Onoria’s music room. When Onoria became due, Peter hurried out of the window into the garden, and crossed by the wall into his own domain. On Onoria’s arrival, she found Elsie, punctual and passive, waiting for her usual rites upon the piano. Ostriches would have known better than Peter and Elsie. They do not, when they plunge their heads in the sand to escape an enemy (even while exposing the rest of their person to view), sing Scotch dialect songs with voices like a damaged kettle. Peter’s voice carried, and on one still day it reached Onoria coming up the road. She had a faultless ear and she knew it was Peter’s voice, and that it came, not out of his window, which would have been a misdemeanour, but out of her own, which was a crime; and she knew that Peter could not play his own accompaniments. She hastened to the gate, but by the time she had reached it Peter had already vanished—he did not know what he was leaving his accomplice to face, but there is no reasonable doubt that if he had known he would still have left her. Onoria rushed into the music room, breathless and terrific. “What,” she cried with piercing incisiveness, “are you doing here?”