"There is nothing to tell," Esme replied. "He was nice to me while I was there; that is all." The finality of the phrase struck on her own ears desolately. That was all. Her romance had begun and ended with her holiday. Rose made no comment. The scrappy information had illumined things for her surprisingly. She felt suddenly very tender towards her sister. She put the hair back from her face and kissed her gently. "You are just sweet. You look such a child with your hair like that," she said. But she made no further mention of Paul Hallam. There were a dozen questions she would have liked to ask, but she forbore. It was not fair to attempt to force the girl's confidence; her very reluctance to speak of this acquaintance proved that there was more in it than she allowed, perhaps more than she yet realised. There followed days of restlessness and alternating moods more fitful than any barometer. Sinclair called, and made himself so agreeable to Rose and the children, and was so markedly attentive to Esme that Rose found herself wishing that this quite eligible and agreeable young man was the object of her sister's interest, as he unmistakably desired to be. Esme was pleased to see him again; but her manner towards him showed no particular partiality. It was certainly not George Sinclair, Rose decided, who was responsible for the change in the girl. Sinclair called frequently after that first visit, and speedily became on very friendly terms with the family. He found a staunch ally in Rose, who, considering the other affair too remote to be serious, saw in Sinclair an eventual safety-valve for her sister's repressed emotions. Repressed emotion was undesirable; it hid like a morbid germ in the brain cells and worked with insidious effect upon the mind. In Esme it betrayed itself in unexpected bursts of irritability, as her discontent with things grew. Mainly this was the result of reaction, and was but a phase in the cure of which Sinclair aided unconsciously. His visits made a break in the general monotony. And then one day a letter came for Esme. Rose took it in. It was directed in the same small untidy handwriting which she remembered vividly seeing on the front page of the book in Esme's room. She had looked for that book often since but she had never seen it again. Now, with the letter in her hand, her thoughts went back to that little scene in the bedroom, and her brows knitted themselves in a frown. Paul Hallam had broken the silence and written to the girl. She carried the letter up to Esme's room and laid it on the table beside her bed. "Poor George!" she reflected. "This puts him out of the picture anyway." Then she went downstairs and left it to the girl to make her own discovery on her return.