He had not Gerda’s knack of silence.  Gerda would shut up tight over her plans and thoughts, like a little oyster.  She was no babbler; she did things and never talked.  But Barry’s plans brimmed up and over.

Neville said “You sudden child!  And in July and August, too....  But you’ll have only a month before you join Nan in Cornwall, won’t you?”

Gerda nodded, munching a buttered scone.

Grandmama, like an old war-horse scenting the fray, thought “Is it going to be an affair?  Will they fall in love?  And what of Nan?” Then rebuked herself for forgetting what she really knew quite well, having been told it often, that men and girls in these days worked together and did everything together, with no thought of affairs or of falling in love....  Only these two were very attractive, the young Briscoe and the pretty child, Gerda.

Neville, who knew Gerda, and that she was certainly in love again (it happened so often with Gerda), thought “Shall I stop it?  Or shall I let things take their course?  Oh, I’ll let them alone.  It’s only one of Gerda’s childish hero-worships, and he’ll be kind without flirting.  It’ll do Gerda good to go on with this new work she’s so keen on.  And she knows he cares for Nan.  I shall let her go.”

Neville very nearly always let Gerda and Kay go their own way now that they were grown-up.  To interfere would have been the part of the middle-aged old-fashioned mother, and for that part Neville had no liking.  To be her children’s friend and good comrade, that was her role in life.

“It’s good of you to have her,” she said to Barry.  “I hope you won’t be sorry....  She’s very stupid sometimes—­regular Johnny Head-in-air.”

“I should be a jolly sight more use,” Kay remarked.  “But I can’t come, unfortunately.  She can’t spell, you know.  And her punctuation is weird.”

“She’ll learn,” said Barry, cheerfully, and Gerda smiled serenely at them over her tea-cup.

4

Barry in the office was quick, alert, cheerful, and business-like, and very decided, sometimes impatient.  Efficient:  that was the word.  He would skim the correspondence and dictate answers out of his head, walking about the room, interrupted all the time by the telephone and by people coming in to see him.  Gerda’s hero-worship grew and grew; her soul swelled with it; she shut it down tight and remained calm and cool.  When he joked, when he smiled his charming smile, her heart turned over within her.  When he had signed the typed letters, she would sometimes put her hand for a moment where his had rested on the paper.  He was stern with her sometimes, spoke sharply and impatiently, and that, in a queer way, she liked.  She had felt the same pleasure at school, when the head of the school, whom she had greatly and secretly venerated, had had her up to the sixth form room and rowed her.  Why?  That was for psycho-analysts to discover; Gerda only knew the fact.  And Barry, after he had spoken sharply to her, when he had got over his anger, would smile and be even kinder than usual, and that was the best of all.