It was Vassie who entered, somewhat sulkily, her beauty clouded by a shade of reluctance—­Phoebe, shrinking, palpitant, staying in the shadowy passage.

“Phoebe has come to know if she may say good-bye to you, Ishmael?” said Vassie.  “She’s heard you’re going to London, and can’t believe you’ll ever come back safely....”

“Why, Phoebe, that’s kind of you,” he called; “but won’t you come in for a moment?” He was pleased after a mild fashion to see her—­she at least stood for something not too intimately connected with his own household, he told himself.  The next moment he remembered that there had been some suggestion—­what his blurred recollection of it could not tell him—­that she might be being courted by Archelaus; but the slight recoil of distaste stirred within him fell away before her frank eagerness, her kindly warmth, as she pattered into the room, her skirts swaying around her.  She sat primly down beside the couch while Vassie stayed by its foot, determined not to sit down also and so give an air of settled ease to the interview.

“I—­I hope you are better, Ishmael?” faltered Phoebe.  She had never before been in a young man’s bedroom, even bereft of its tenant, and she felt shy and fluttered.

“Oh, I’m all right!” answered Ishmael.  “I don’t think poor Silly Peter has enough muscle to hit very hard, you know.”

A look of intense relief floated across the strained demureness of Phoebe’s countenance:  raised eyelids and a heightened colour testified to what passed through her mind.

“Oh, then it was Silly Peter—­” she began ingenuously; then broke off.

“Yes, didn’t you know?  He was dazed with the lights, and then the sudden darkness and all of us being so angry, I suppose....  Hullo, what’s that?”

It was Killigrew’s voice calling softly up the stairs to Vassie.  She hesitated, made a feint of going to the door only to hear what he wanted, and then went rustling down to him.  Phoebe snuggled a little more comfortably on her chair with an unconscious movement of pleasure.

“He said downstairs he wanted to finish taking her picture to-day while the light lasted,” she said; then ran on:  “Ishmael, I’ve been so unhappy....”

“Have you, Phoebe?  Why, what about?” Then, as he saw her flush and bite her pouting lower lip, he added:  “Not because of me?  I say, how jolly of you!  But there wasn’t any necessity—­”

“How silly you are!  As if one did things—­worried and that sort of thing—­because it was necessary!  It’s because one can’t help it.”

“Then it was all the nicer of you.  But I meant that really it wasn’t anything to worry about.  I’m as right as rain, and it’s given me a jolly good excuse to go up to London and see the world.”

Panic peeped in Phoebe’s brown eyes, giving her a flashing look of something woodland, despite her would-be smart attire.  She dropped her lids to hide it.