“Really, Jack, that’s utterly absurd!  Flick was not thinking of her at all.  Something in the garden had frightened him.  Your father feels sure that it was a snake which he himself killed the next morning.”  And then, for she was most painfully disturbed by this scene between herself and Jack, she said quietly:  “I’m sorry that Mrs. Crofton ever came to Beechfield.  I didn’t think there was anyone in the world who would make you speak to me as you have spoken to me now.”

“I hate injustice!” he exclaimed, a little shamefacedly.  “I can’t think why you’ve turned against her, Janet.  It’s so mean as well as so unkind!  She has hardly any friends in the world, and she thought by the account Godfrey gave of us that we should become her friends.”

“It’s always a woman’s own fault if she has no friends, especially when she’s such an attractive woman as Mrs. Crofton,” said Janet shortly.  She hesitated, and then added something for which she was sorry immediately afterwards:  “I happen to know rather more about Mrs. Crofton than most of the people in Beechfield do.”

She spoke with that touch of mysterious finality which is always so irritating to a listener who is in indifferent sympathy with a speaker.

“What d’you mean?” cried Jack fiercely.  “I insist on your telling me what you mean!”

Janet Tosswill told herself with Scotch directness that she had been a fool.  But if Jack was—­she hardly knew how to put it to herself—­so—­so bewitched by Mrs. Crofton as he seemed to be, then perhaps, as they had got to this point, he had better hear the truth: 

“Mrs. Crofton made herself very much talked about in the neighbourhood of the place where she and her husband settled after the War.  She was so actively unkind, and made him so wretched, that at last he committed suicide.  At least that is what is believed by everyone who knew them in Essex.”

“I suppose a woman told you all this?” he said in a dangerously calm voice.

“Yes, it was a woman, Jack.”

“Of course it was!  Every woman, young or old, is jealous of her because she’s so pretty and—­so—­so feminine, and because she has nothing about her of the clever, hard woman who is the fashion nowadays!  The only person who does her justice in this place is Rosamund.”

“I disapprove very much of Rosamund’s silly, school-girlish, adoration of her,” said Janet sharply.

She was just going to add something more when she saw Timmy slipping quietly back into the room.  And all at once she felt sorry—­deeply sorry—­that this rather absurd scene had taken place between herself and Jack.  She blamed herself for having let it come to this pass.

“I daresay I’m prejudiced,” she exclaimed.  “Take this note, Jack, and tell Mrs. Crofton that Flick shall be securely shut up.”

“All right.”  Jack shrugged his shoulders rather ostentatiously, and disappeared through the window, while Janet, with a half-humorous sigh, told herself that perhaps he was justified in condemning in his own mind, as he was certainly doing now, the extraordinary vagaries of womankind.  She turned back to her writing-table again.  However disturbed and worried she might feel, there were the weekly books to be gone through, and this time without Nanna’s shrewd, kindly help.