very slowly with her hands stretched out.  Something rustled in the undergrowth, quite close; she saw a pair of green eyes shining.  Her heart jumped into her mouth.  The thing sprang—­there was a swish of ferns and twigs, and silence.  Noel clasped her breast.  A poaching cat!  And again she moved forward.  But she had lost direction.  ‘I’m going round and round,’ she thought.  ’They always do.’  And the sinking scattered feeling of the “bushed” clutched at her again.  ‘Shall I call?’ she thought.  ’I must be near the road.  But it’s so babyish.’  She moved on again.  Her foot struck something soft.  A voice muttered a thick oath; a hand seized her ankle.  She leaped, and dragged and wrenched it free; and, utterly unnerved, she screamed, and ran forward blindly.

V

No one could have so convinced a feeling as Jimmy Fort that he would be a ‘bit of a makeshift’ for Noel.  He had spent the weeks after his interview with her father obsessed by her image, often saying to himself “It won’t do.  It’s playing it too low down to try and get that child, when I know that, but for her trouble, I shouldn’t have a chance.”  He had never had much opinion of his looks, but now he seemed to himself absurdly old and dried-up in this desert of a London.  He loathed the Office job to which they had put him, and the whole atmosphere of officialdom.  Another year of it, and he would shrivel like an old apple!  He began to look at himself anxiously, taking stock of his physical assets now that he had this dream of young beauty.  He would be forty next month, and she was nineteen!  But there would be times too when he would feel that, with her, he could be as much of a “three-year-old” as the youngster she had loved.  Having little hope of winning her, he took her “past” but lightly.  Was it not that past which gave him what chance he had?  On two things he was determined:  He would not trade on her past.  And if by any chance she took him, he would never show her that he remembered that she had one.

After writing to Gratian he had spent the week before his holiday began, in an attempt to renew the youthfulness of his appearance, which made him feel older, leaner, bonier and browner than ever.  He got up early, rode in the rain, took Turkish baths, and did all manner of exercises; neither smoked nor drank, and went to bed early, exactly as if he had been going to ride a steeplechase.  On the afternoon, when at last he left on that terrific pilgrimage, he gazed at his face with a sort of despair, it was so lean, and leather-coloured, and he counted almost a dozen grey hairs.

When he reached the bungalow, and was told that she was working in the corn-fields, he had for the first time a feeling that Fate was on his side.  Such a meeting would be easier than any other!  He had been watching her for several minutes before she saw him, with his heart beating more violently than it had ever beaten in the trenches; and that new feeling of hope stayed with him—­all through the greeting, throughout supper, and even after she had left them and gone upstairs.  Then, with the suddenness of a blind drawn down, it vanished, and he sat on, trying to talk, and slowly getting more and more silent and restless.