“Ellice, child, why not go back with Hobbins?”

“I am coming with you,” Ellice said.

“You—­you will not—­I mean you will—­not be silly or rude to—­”

Ellice drew herself up with a childish dignity.  “I shall not forget that I am a lady, Connie,” she said, and said it with such stateliness and such dignity that Connie felt no inclination to laugh.

Helen frowned.  She was annoyed at the sight of Ellice, frankly she did not like the girl.  Helen was a good, honest woman who liked everything that was good and honest.  Ellice Brand might be good and honest, but there was something about the girl that was beyond Helen’s ken.  She was so elfin, so gipsy-like, so different from most girls Helen knew, and had known.

During the long afternoon, when they sat for a time in the garden, or in the shady drawing-room, Joan was aware of the fixed and intent gaze of a pair of dark eyes.  Strangely and wonderfully dark were those eyes, and they seemed to possess some magnetic power, a power of making themselves felt.  More than once in the middle of saying something to Helen or to Connie, Joan found herself at a loss for words, and impelled by some unknown force to turn her head and look straight into those eyes that blazed in the little white face.

Why did the girl stare at her so?  Why, Joan wondered?  A strange, elfin-like child, a bud on the point of bursting into a wondrous beauty, Joan realised, and realised too that there was enmity in the dark eyes that stared at her so mercilessly.

“Ellice, child, go out into the garden,” Helen said presently.  “Come with me, we will leave Connie and Joan to have a little talk.  Come, there are lots of things to see.  This is a wonderful garden, you know—­far, far better than Buddesby.”

“It isn’t,” Ellice said quietly.  “There’s no garden in the world like Buddesby garden, and no place in the world like Buddesby, but I will come with you if you want me to.”

“A strange girl!” Joan said.

“A very dear, good, lovable, but passionate child,” Connie said.  “Now let us talk of you and Johnny, Joan, of the future.  Helen has told you that—­that she—­”

“She wishes to leave us soon?  Yes.”

“And so,” Connie slipped her hand into Joan’s, “the marriage need not be long delayed.”

“Whenever—­he wishes it,” Joan said, and for her life she could not put any warmth into her voice, and Connie, who noticed most things, noticed the chill coldness of it.

“And yet she must love Johnny, or she would not marry him,” Connie thought.

“I leave everything to you, and to Helen and to him.”

It seemed almost as if Joan had a strange disinclination to utter Johnny’s name.  Johnny sounded so babyish, so childlike, so affectionate, yet she felt that she could not speak of him as “John.”  It would sound hard and crude in the ears of those who loved him, and called him by the more tender name.