‘Do you absolutely need the money, John?’ She came to the point with a frank, blunt directness which angered him.

‘I don’t absolutely need anything,’ he retorted, controlling himself.  ‘But Dain made the offer——­’

‘Because if you do,’ she proceeded, ‘I dare say Uncle Meshach——­’

‘Look here, my girl,’ he interrupted in turn, ’I’ve had exactly as much of Uncle Meshach as I can stand.  I know all about Uncle Meshach, what I wanted to know was whether you cared to sell the house.’  And then he added, after hesitating, and with a false graciousness, ‘To oblige me.’

There was a marked pause.

‘I really shouldn’t like to sell the house, John,’ she answered quietly.  ‘It was aunt’s, and——­’

‘Enough said! enough said!’ he cried.  ’That finishes it.  I suppose you don’t mind my having asked you!’

He walked out of the room in a rage.

Tears came into her eyes, the tears of a wounded and proud heart.  Was it conceivable that he expected her to be willing to sell her house?...  He must indeed be in serious straits.  She would consult Uncle Meshach.

The front door banged.  And then Rose entered the room.

Leonora drove back the tears.

’Your father has been suggesting that we sell this house, and go and live at Sneyd,’ she said to the girl in a trembling voice.  ’Aren’t you surprised?’ She seldom talked about John to her daughters, but at that moment a desire for sympathy overwhelmed her.

‘I should never be surprised at anything where father was concerned,’ said Rose coldly, with a slight hint of aloofness and of mental superiority.  ‘Not at anything.’

Leonora got up, and, leaving the room, went into the garden through the side door opposite the stable.  She could hear Millicent practising the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust.  As she passed down the sombre garden the sound of the piano and of Milly’s voice in the brilliant ecstatic phrases of the song grew fainter.  She shook violently, like a child who is recovering from a fit of sobs, and without thinking she fastened her coat.  ’What a shame it is that he should want to sell my house!  What a shame!’ she murmured, full of an aggrieved resentment.  At the same time she was surprised to find herself so suddenly and so deeply disturbed.

* * * * *

At the foot of the long garden was a low fence separating it from the meadow, and in the fence a wicket from which ran a faint track to the main field-path.  She leaned against the fence, a few yards away from the wicket, at a spot where a clump of bushes screened the house.  No one could possibly have seen her from the house, even had the bushes not been there; but she wished to isolate herself completely, and to find tranquillity in the isolation.  The calm spring night, chill but not too cold, cloudy but not too dark, favoured her intention.  She gazed about her at the obscure nocturnal forms of things, at the