And it was certainly not Ellen Neal, the elderly woman who had followed the Darcy fortunes in their waxing and waning for many a year--part servant, part mentor, always friend; declining to be shaken off even in those crises when Mrs. Darcy "enjoyed doing without servants"; supporting herself during such financial depressions by means of a skilful needle--supporting, Joan sometimes suspected, others than herself. The girl recalled one significant incident of her early childhood; her mother, pale and anxious, arguing at the door with a rude man who declined to leave without something she seemed unable to give him, until Ellen appeared, half running up the street, opening her shopping-bag as she came. And when she had thrust something into the rude man's hands and slammed the door in his face, Mrs. Darcy had turned silently to the servant and kissed her. Joan's feeling for Ellen was one of the few she had never tried to analyze. It was simply there, like her breath, her eyesight. She could not be said to love her--there was nothing attractive about Ellen Neal; yet her only quarrel with her father (if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel) was on the subject of Ellen. Once during Joan's previous summer vacation, the Major, who disliked familiarity in servants, had taken occasion to remind Ellen most kindly that his daughter was almost a young lady now and should be spoken to as Miss Joan, no longer as "Joie" or as "Baby." Joan had thoroughly concurred in this opinion; until, happening to glance at Ellen as she left the room, she saw that the servant's compressed lips were trembling. She had cried out unaccountably: "No such thing, Nellen! You're to call me anything you like, always!"--and then she had turned upon her father, scolding, stammering out astonishing reminders, raising her voice, altogether behaving in a manner most unbecoming a gentlewoman and a Darcy--as her father quite obviously forebore to suggest to her. The quarrel had been altogether a most unsatisfactory one. During her tirade the Major had sat with poised carving-knife, regarding his daughter under mildly raised eyebrows. When she had stormed herself out, he remarked quietly, in quotation marks: "Her voice was ever soft and low, An excellent thing in woman." But the matter of "Miss Joan" was, by tacit consent, never resumed between them. No, it was decidedly not Ellen Neal who was responsible for her vague dread of home-coming. The girl, who had an odd dislike of anything vague in her mental processes, pursued the fugitive sensation to its lair with relentless precision.