It was another shock to Connie later when Johnny came.  She watched for the greeting between these two, and felt shocked and startled when Johnny took Joan’s hand and held it for a moment, then lifted it to his lips.  No other kiss passed between them.

And Connie felt her own cheeks burning, and wondered why.

How strange!  Lovers, and particularly accepted lovers, always kissed!

There was that about Johnny that for the first time in her life almost irritated Connie.  She watched him, and saw that his eyes were following Joan with that look of strange, dog-like devotion that Connie remembered with a start she had herself surprised in Ellice’s eyes before now.

And as she watched, so watched another, herself almost forgotten as she sat in a corner of the room.  The big black eyes were on these two, drifting from the face of one to the face of the other, taking no heed, and no count of anything else but of these two affianced lovers.

Very clearly and almost coldly Joan had expressed her own wishes.

“If you wish the marriage to take place soon, I am content.  I would like it to—­to be—­not very soon—­not just yet,” she added, and seemed to be speaking against her own will, and as though in opposition to her own thoughts.  “Still, whatever you arrange, I will willingly agree to.  I prefer to leave it all to you, Helen, and you, Connie, and—­and you, Johnny.  But it might take place just before Helen goes away.  That would be time enough, would it not?”

“It was the very thing I was going to suggest,” Helen said.  “In three months’ time then, Joan.”

Joan bowed her head.  “In three months’ time then,” she said.

They were all three very silent as Johnny drove the little car back to Buddesby that evening.  The sun was down, but the twilight lingered.  Ellice sat crushed in between Johnny’s big bulk and Connie, and she would not have changed places with the queen on her throne.

“There’s Rundle with that horrible lurcher dog of his,” said Johnny, and spoke more to make conversation than anything else.

They could see the man, the village poacher, slouching along under a hedge with the ever-faithful dog close at heel.

“A horrible, fierce-looking beast,” said Connie.  “It fights with every dog in the place, and—­”

“But it loves him; it loves its master,” Ellice said passionately.  “It would die for its master, wouldn’t it?”

“Why, I daresay it would, Gipsy,” Johnny said.  “But why so excited about it, little girl?”

“If you—­if you,” Ellice said, “had the offer of two dogs, the one splendid, a thoroughbred deerhound, graceful, beautiful, fine to look at, but cold and with no love to give its master, and the other—­a hideous beast like Rundle’s lurcher—­but a beast who could love and die for its master, and dying lick the hand of the master it loved, glad and grateful to—­to die for him—­which would you have, which would you have, Johnny?”