Joan moved from under the deft hands and stood up. "You want to know why I am looking like a tragedy queen this morning," she said. "It isn't strange you should be curious; I must seem quite mad. Yesterday"--she caught her hands to her throat--"was what might be called a disastrous failure. I tried to be very clever, and I was nothing but a most awful fool. He knew, he had known all the time, the thing which I had been so afraid to tell him. It had not made any difference to his loving me, but yesterday I had that other man here, you remember him, don't you? You might almost recognize his roses." Her eyes wandered round the room, her hands came away slowly from her throat; she had seemed to be near tears, but suddenly the outburst passed. "That's all," she said dryly, "Dick drew his own conclusions from the man being here. I tried to explain, at least I think I tried to explain. I know I wanted to hold him back, but he threw aside my hands and went from the room. I shan't ever see him again, Fanny, and the funny thing is that it doesn't really seem to matter this morning." "Oh, you poor thing," Fanny whispered again. She did not say much else, because for the present words were useless. Otherwise her own mind was full of consoling reflections. A man, after all, is not so easily turned aside from what must have been a very big purpose in his life. Already Fanny could look into the future and say "Bless you, my children," in her heart. She had been afraid, drawing her conclusions from Dick's face and Joan's silence, that things were very much worse. Joan might, for instance, have told the truth, and Dick, man-like, might have resented it. She ran downstairs presently and came up again with the breakfast, fussing round Joan till the other made an attempt to eat something, pouring out her tea for her, buttering her toast. "I should very much like to see you have a jolly good cry, honey," she confessed when the pretence at breakfast had finished. "It would do you a world of good. But since you don't seem able to, I shall pull the curtains and you must try and sleep. I'll come and call you again at ten." Joan lay quite still in the dim and curtained room, but she did not either sleep or cry. She did not even think very much. She could just see the pattern of the wall-paper, and her mind occupied itself in counting the roses and in working out how the line in between made squares or diamonds. It was like that all day; little things came to her assistance and interested her enormously. The collection of flowers which Fanny had got on her new hat; the map on the wall of the railway carriage; the fact that the station master at Wrotham seemed to have grown very thin, and was brushing his hair a new way. Uncle John met her as once before at the station, and almost without thinking Joan lifted her face. He stooped very gravely to kiss it. "You are welcome home, Joan," he said. "We have been lonely without you."