"All right, you tell her," her husband muttered behind her retreating back. "Can't think, though, why you don't leave the girls alone. However they start it always ends that way. You and I have seen quite a number take to the streets, and you don't do much to prevent them short of grumbling at them." "They shan't do it in my house," reiterated Mrs. Carew; she stumped in dignified protest from the room, and upstairs to the offender's attic. The first guest had already arrived, so Mrs. Carew could not voice her disapproval; she expressed it, however, in a glare which she directed towards him, and the noise with which she dumped down the tea-tray. The room was full of flowers, which did not add to her approval; she detected in them a sure sign of immorality. Great, beautiful red roses, nodding from every vase, filling the air with their rather heavy scent. The visitor also inspired her with a sense of distrust. He looked what Mrs. Carew described as "a man about town." She had been fond of Joan; behind her anger lay a small hurt sense of pity; she was too nice a young lady to go the way of the others. She opened the door to Dick a little later with a sour face, and she did not even trouble to take him upstairs. "Miss Rutherford is high up as you can get"--she jerked her thumb upwards--"it's the only door on the landing, you can't mistake it." With that she left him, and Dick found his own way upstairs. He had stayed away all day till the exact hour he had named, with some difficulty, but with a punctilious sense of doing right. Joan had not answered his letter and he looked upon her silence as an admission that she loved him, but there were a great many things between them that would have to be talked over first coldly and sensibly. He had thought the matter out and he had decided that he would not leave it all to her, to tell or not to tell as she thought best, which had been his first idea. He would help her by telling her that he had always known, and that it made no difference. He wanted to make her confession as easy as possible.