He paid his bill, and taking his hat, sauntered out into the Strand.  The carelessness which had left the check underneath the hearth-rug was not, however, the only bad break made in connection with this affair.  At a certain moment during luncheon Garratt Skinner had unwisely smiled and had not quite concealed the smile with his hand.  Against her every wish, that smile forced itself upon Sylvia’s recollections as she drove home.  She tried to interpret it in every pleasant sense, but it kept its true character in her thoughts, try as she might.  It remained vividly a very hateful thing—­the smile of the man who had gulled her.

CHAPTER XII

THE HOUSE OF THE RUNNING WATER

A week later, on a sunlit afternoon, Sylvia and her father drove northward out of Weymouth between the marshes and the bay.  Sylvia was silent and looked about her with expectant eyes.

“I have been lucky, Sylvia,” her father had said to her.  “I have secured for our summer holiday the very house in which you were born.  It cost me some trouble, but I was determined to get it if I could, for I had an idea that you would be pleased.  However, you are not to see it until it is quite ready.”

There was a prettiness and a delicacy in this thought which greatly appealed to Sylvia.  He had spoken it with a smile of tenderness.  Affection, surely, could alone have prompted it; and she thanked him very gratefully.  They were now upon their way to take possession.  A little white house set back under a hill and looking out across the bay from a thick cluster of trees caught Sylvia’s eye.  Was that the house, she wondered?  The carriage turned inland and passed the white house, and half a mile further on turned again eastward along the road to Wareham, following the valley, which runs parallel to the sea.  They ascended the long steep hill which climbs to Osmington, until upon their left hand a narrow road branched off between hawthorn hedges to the downs.  The road dipped to a little hollow and in the hollow a little village nestled.  A row of deep-thatched white cottages with leaded window-panes opened on to a causeway of stone flags which was bordered with purple phlox and raised above the level of the road.  Farther on, the roof of a mill rose high among trees, and an open space showed to Sylvia the black massive wheel against the yellow wall.  And then the carriage stopped at a house on the left-hand side, and Garratt Skinner got out.

“Here we are,” he said.

It was a small square house of the Georgian days, built of old brick, duskily red.  You entered it at the side and the big level windows of the living rooms looked out upon a wide and high-walled garden whence a little door under a brick archway in the wall gave a second entrance on to the road.  Into this garden Sylvia wandered.  If she had met with but few people who matched the delicate company of