"She knew perfectly well you were expecting me to-day," she declared when, later on, she and Robin found themselves alone again. "Though I haven't the slightest doubt she told that nice brother of hers just what she wished him to believe. She simply wanted to have first look at me so as to be able to give the village to-morrow a full, true, and particular account of what I'm like." However, she replied to Miss Caroline's apologies with the necessary cordiality demanded by the occasion and, ringing for Maria, ordered fresh tea. The rector protested. "No, no," he said hastily. "You must be far too tired to want visitors when you've only just come off a long journey. We'll pay our call another day." Brian Tempest was the very antithesis of his sister--tall and somewhat ascetic-looking, with a face to which one was almost tempted to apply the word beautiful, it was so well-proportioned and cut with the sure fineness of a cameo. His dark hair was sprinkled with grey at the temples, and beneath a broad, tranquil brow looked out a pair of kindly, luminous eyes that were neither all brown nor all grey. Later, when she knew him better, Ann was wont to inform him that his eyes were a "heather mixture--like tweed." Small, fine lines puckered humorously at their corners, and there was humour, too, in the long, thin-lipped mouth. Robin and Ann brushed aside his protest with a hearty sincerity there was no mistaking. Whatever each of them might feel concerning Miss Caroline, they were in complete accord in the welcome they extended to her brother. He was no stranger to Robin. The latter had put up at the village inn during the time occupied by Maria Coombe in "cleaning down" the Cottage and making it habitable, and the rector had dropped in to see him in a characteristically informal, friendly fashion on more than one occasion. The two chatted together while Miss Caroline put Ann through a searching catechism as to her past, present, and future mode of life, including the age at which her parents had died, the particular kind of work she had undertaken during the war--appearing somewhat taken aback when Ann explained that she had driven a car, the making of shirts and mufflers coming more within the scope of Caroline's own idea as to what was "suitable" work for a young girl--and the length of time she had lived with Lady Susan. The coincidence of Robin's obtaining a post in the neighbourhood of Lady Susan's home impressed her enormously, as fate's unexpected shufflings of the cards invariably do impress those whose existence is passed in a very narrow groove.