Julie did not answer immediately. She sat looking out into the garden with heightened colour and vaguely perplexed eyes. She wondered why Mrs Lawless should have singled out Teddy Bolitho from the host of young men who would all have been willing to come. She wished that she had mentioned any name rather than his. "You don't like my plan?" Mrs Lawless said quietly. Julie looked up. "Yes... Yes, I do," she said. "I was only--thinking. Of course Teddy Bolitho would come--anybody would, if you asked them. And it's heavenly playing on a grass court; there are so few in the Colony. It'll spoil it, though." "I would rather it were spoilt with use than wasted," Mrs Lawless said... "We waste so much." She had risen, and now, moving nearer to the girl, she laid a strong, well-shaped hand upon her shoulder. "Don't you make waste too," she added gently. "I did when I was young... and it leaves me full of vain regrets. Some people think that youth is the best gift of the gods: but it is far from a perfect gift; for the proper appreciation of it is withheld. It is only when the gift is withdrawn that we realise all that it meant. If one could have one's youth a second time, one would get the full value of the hours. You've got it now--that priceless gift; and you are inclined to be careless of it." "I wonder why you say this to me?" Julie murmured. "Because I've been looking on. You say you have observed me... Interest is usually mutual. I have certainly felt interested in you." Julie coloured awkwardly, and looked down. She wondered whether Mrs Lawless had observed her friendship for the man whose name was the same as her own, and if she disapproved of it. "I don't think it altogether depends on oneself what one makes of one's youth," she said. "There is much to be said for that argument," Mrs Lawless answered. "But I could wish you had not found it out so soon." Julie looked up quickly. "You mustn't pity me," she said. "I wouldn't retrace one step of the past... It's the future I would alter, if I could." "And how can you tell," Mrs Lawless inquired, "what the future holds?" The girl smiled drearily. "I know very well what it doesn't hold," she answered. "That's as far as I care to go." And then suddenly her wandering gaze fell on a photograph that stood in a silver frame on the piano, and she became silent, regarding it with an intensity that drew Mrs Lawless' eyes to the object that excited her interest. "You recognise it?" she said, and there was a quality in her voice such as Julie had never heard in any voice before. "That was taken before-- he left the Army." It was a portrait of Lawless in regimentals, younger and handsomer than the man Julie knew; but there was lacking in the younger face something which the older face possessed. Julie could not determine what that something was. "Yes, I recognise it... But I miss--the scar," she said.