She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele's visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow's head. Bobby's incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence's horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence's frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt. There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence. For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle's lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented. That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circumstances. When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele's visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly. "Oh, that!" she said. "That's ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background." "The new curate!" suggested Bobby, grinning. "The chap who is fluttering the dovecots on account of his being unmarried. You devoted several letters to him, I remember. What's he like?" "He's a little man in a big coat and a big hat," she answered. "What can be seen of him is quite nice, but it isn't much. There must be a brain of sorts under the hat, but it's little too. His chief idiosyncrasy is that he fancies himself all brain. Mrs North is trying to marry her daughter to him." "And he prefers you," commented Bobby... "naturally." Prudence smiled wickedly.