“I will break down her reserve.  I think she is lovable and sweet when once one can force her to throw aside this mask,” Helen Everard thought.

So they had come to Starden together.

Joan had said little when she had first looked over the place; but Helen, watching her, saw a tinge of colour come into her cheeks, and her breast rise and fall quickly, which proved that Joan was by no means so unmoved as she would appear.

It was her home, the home of her people.  It was to-day almost as it had been a hundred years ago, and a hundred years before that, and even a hundred years earlier still.

The low-pitched, old-fashioned rooms, with the mullioned windows, the deep embrasures, the great open, stone-slabbed hearths, with their andirons and dog-grates, the walls panelled with carved linen-fold oak, darkened by age alone and polished to a dull, glossy glow by hands that would work no more.

Through these rooms, each redolent of the past, each breathing of a kindly, comfortable home-life, the girl went, looking about her with eyes that saw everything and yet seemed to see nothing.

“You like it, dear?” Helen asked.

“It is all wonderful, beautiful!” Joan said, and yet she spoke with a touch of sadness in her voice....  “How—­how lonely one might be here!” she added.

“You—­you must not think of loneliness; you will never be lonely, my dear.  If you are, it will be of your own choice!”

“Who knows?” Joan smiled sadly.  She was thinking of a man who had told her that he loved her.  There had been more than one, but the one man stood out clear and distinct from all others; she could even remember the words he had used.

“If, in telling you that I love you, I have sinned past all forgiveness, I glory in it, and I take not one word of it back.”

Yet how could he love her?  How could he, when he had insulted her, when he had used her name, as he had, when he had humiliated and shamed her, how could he profess to love her?  And they had met but three times in their lives.

“Joan, dear,” Helen Everard said, “Joan!”

“Yes?  I am sorry, I—­I was thinking.”  Joan looked up.

Helen had come into the room, an open letter in her hand.

“I wrote to John and Constance Everard, my nephew and niece,” Helen said.  “I told them I was here with you, and asked them to come over.  They are coming to-morrow, dear.  I think you will like them.”

“I am sure I shall,” Joan said; but there was no enthusiasm in her voice, only cold politeness that seemed to chill a little.

“I glory in it,” she was thinking, “and take not one word of it back.”  She shrugged her shoulders disdainfully and turned away.

“What time will they be coming, Helen?” she asked, for she had made up her mind.  She would think no more of this man, and remember no more of his speeches.  She would wipe him out of her memory.  Life for her would begin again here in Starden, and the past should hold nothing, nothing, nothing!