“Well,” Julia suggested, “why not change it?  Such a trifle as a name surely need not stand in our way; we have got over worse things than that.  Mother can be something else, or I can; mother had better do it; father will forget who he is if I make a change.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Violet said; “I only wish you could change it though; I never want to write to you as Julia Polkington in case some servant were to notice the address; one never knows how these things come out.”

“Don’t write as that,” her sister told her; “address me as ’Julia Snooks’ or anything else you like; I am not particular.”

Violet did not take this as a serious suggestion; nevertheless, Julia told Mr. Frazer on the platform at Marbridge that she and Violet had been having a christening, and that she was now Julia Snooks.  Mr. Ponsonby said it was ridiculous, to which Julia replied—­

“That is what I am myself.”

Mrs. Polkington said it was foolish too, but she did not say so vehemently; she felt that in the Frazer circle, especially at the Palace where she would meet people from everywhere, she might possibly come across some one who had heard of Julia.  It was unlikely; still it is a small world, and Polkington an uncommon name.  “Why not choose something simple, like ’Gray’?” she suggested.

“Because,” Julia answered, “that is what I am not.”

* * * * *

But fate had one exceedingly bitter pill for Mrs. Polkington.  On the day after Cherie and her husband sailed for South Africa, it was known in Marbridge that the news of Mr. Harding’s engagement was false.  The girl gossip had coupled with him was engaged, it is true, and to a Mr. Harding, but to another and entirely different bearer of the name.  The real, eligible Mr. Harding called at East Street to explain to Mrs. Polkington how the mistake had arisen, to tell her that he himself had been away in the north for some weeks and so had heard nothing of it.  Also to hear—­and he had heard nothing of that either—­that Cherie was married and gone.

The news of Mr. Harding’s freedom and his call, and what she fancied it might have implied, did not reach Cherie till after her arrival in Africa.  It did not tend to soothe the first weeks of married life, nor to make easier the rigorous, but no doubt wholesome, breaking-in process to which her husband wisely subjected her.

CHAPTER XV

THE GOOD COMRADE

Rawson-Clew was very busy that autumn, so busy that the events which had taken place in Holland were rather blotted out of his mind; he had not exactly forgotten them, only among the press of other things he did not often think about them and they soon came to take their proper unimportant place among his recollections.  Julia he thought of occasionally, but less and less in connection with the foolish holiday, more in connection