Since her return from the South of France, she had felt the thing coming. In October, as soon as Myra had returned from her holiday, fear had driven her from Medlow. The hunger in the man’s eyes proclaimed an impossible situation. The guest and host position she had changed after the first few weeks. Brother and sister and herself kept house together—on the face of it a sensible and economical arrangement. Mr. Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, once more financial advisers, commended it with enthusiasm. The summer had passed happily enough. The _modus vivendi_ with the sections of Medlow society respectively symbolized by Landsdowne House and Blair Park had arranged itself automatically. She found conferred upon her the Freedom of each. The essential snobbery of English life is a myth kept alive by our enemies. It is true that the squire and the linen-draper do not ask each other and their families to dinner. Their social worlds are apart. They don’t want to ask each other to dinner. They would never dream of asking each other to dinner, one no more than the other; they respect each other too mightily. But a dweller in both worlds, such as Olivia, Trivett-ed and Gale-d though she was on the one side, yet on the other, the wife of the famous Alexis Triona and the friend of the Olifants, folks whose genealogy was lost somewhere in a Pictish bonfire of archives, can wander up and down the whole social gamut at her good pleasure. Besides she herself does not mix the incompatible. A mere question of the art of life, which Olivia, with her London experiences found easy of resolution. So, in the mild and mellow way on which Medlow prided itself, she had danced and tennis-ed and picnic-ed the summer through. On the Blair Park side—she wondered laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—Blaise Olifant and his sister accompanied her in the gentle festivities. Each day had brought its petty golden dust—the futile Church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the whist-drive of which old John Freke, the linen-draper father of Lydia, had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint Shrewsbury, on shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in Medlow—a thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use Matthew Arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. Everything had gone well until October. Then she had taken prudent flight with Myra to the France and Italy which she had never seen—and there she had stayed till the beginning of May. It was Mrs. Woolcombe who insisted on her return to Medlow. Where else should she return after her wanderings but to her own home? At first everything was just as it used to be. Then, on a trivial cause—an insult offered her by an Italian in Venice which she had laughingly recounted—the passion of Blaise Olifant had suddenly flamed forth.