Cara was a few paces ahead, flanked by Robin and the local doctor, who were each endeavouring to secure her undivided attention. She was looking very lovely, in an elusive frock of some ephemeral material veiling a delicate prismatic undertone of colour. She always dressed rather wonderfully, every detail perfect. There was a kind of frail, worldly charm about her clothes--the sort of charm you never find in the clothes of a thoroughly good and virtuous woman, as Lady Susan trenchantly observed one day. Ann herself was acutely conscious of that faintly languorous, mysterious atmosphere of charm with which Mrs. Hilyard seemed to be invested, and she had sometimes wondered how Eliot was able to resist it and treat her with the same cool detachment which he accorded to other people. To her there was something magnetic in Cara's personality. Perhaps her very silence about herself, and the vague background of an unhappy marriage of which Ann was dimly aware, contributed towards it. She glanced up to see Eliot gazing straight ahead, apparently supremely oblivious of that slender, gracious figure in front, moving lightly betwixt Robin and the stooping, rather clever-looking doctor. Presently they all trooped into the hot-houses--warm and fragrant with the smell of freshly-watered earth, and a rather fierce-looking gardener paused in his work to exhibit this or that particular plant in which he took a special interest. But the pride of the rectory was the orchid-house, and insensibly everybody gravitated towards it. Ann and Eliot were strolling along a little behind the rest, and she paused a moment to rifle a pot of heliotrope of a spray of clustered blossom. "Heavenly stuff!" she exclaimed, sniffing it rapturously. "Smell it!" And she held it out just under Eliot's nose, obviously expecting him to share her enthusiasm. Nothing in the world brings back the past so poignantly as remembered scents--neither sight nor sound. A pictured face, the refrain of a song, may chance to stir the pulse of memory, but a remembered fragrance--intangible, unseen--seems to penetrate to the inmost soul itself, ripping asunder the veil which the years between have woven and refashioning the dead past for us as vividly as though it had never died. Even the very atmosphere of the moment rushes back, and thoughts and feelings we had begun to believe inert and negligible reassert themselves with the old irresistible force with which they swayed us years ago. As Ann light-heartedly proffered her sprig of heliotrope, Eliot's face whitened beneath its tan, and with a swift, almost violent movement he snatched the spray from her hand and, flinging it on to the ground, set his foot upon it. She looked up in astonishment, then shrank back with a low exclamation of dismay as she saw his face. It was altered almost out of recognition--the mouth set in a grim straight line of bitterness, the eyes so hard that they looked cruel.