Her red, curving mouth of a child, cleft chin, and dimpled, tapering hands all promised a certain yieldingness of disposition—­a tendency to take always the line of least resistance—­but it was a charming, appealing kind of frailty which most people—­the sterner sex, certainly—­would be very ready to condone.

It is a wonderful thing to be young.  Molly poured herself out a cup of hideously stewed tea and drank it joyously to an accompaniment of shrimps and bread-and-butter, and when Sara uttered a mild protest, she only laughed and declared that it was a wholesome and digestible diet compared with some of the “studio teas” perpetrated by the artists’ colony at Oldhampton, of which she was a member.

She chattered away gaily to Sara, giving her vivacious thumb-nail portraits of her future neighbours—­the people Selwyn had described as being “much nicer than ourselves.”

“The Herricks and Audrey Maynard are our most intimate friends—­I’m sure you’ll adore them.  Mrs. Maynard is a widow, and if she weren’t so frightfully rich, Monkshaven would be perennially shocked at her.  She is ultra-fashionable, and smokes whenever she chooses, and swears when ordinary language fails her—­all of which things, of course, are anathema to the select circles of Monkshaven.  But then she’s a millionaire’s widow, so instead of giving her the cold shoulder, every one gushes round her and declares ’Mrs. Maynard is such a thoroughly modern type, you know!’”—­Molly mimicked the sugar-and-vinegar accents of the critics to perfection—­“and privately Audrey shouts with laughter at them, while publicly she continues to shock them for the sheer joy of the thing.”

“And who are the Herricks?” asked Sara, smiling.  “Married people?”

“No.”  Molly shook her head.  “Miles is a bachelor who lives with a maiden aunt—­Miss Lavinia.  Or, rather, she lives with him and housekeeps for him.  ‘The Lavender Lady,’ I always call her, because she’s one of those delightful old-fashioned people who remind one of dimity curtains, and pot-pourri, and little muslin bags of lavender.  Miles is a perfect pet, but he’s lame, poor dear.”

Sara waited with a curious eagerness for any description which might seem to fit her recent fellow-traveller, but none came, and at last she threw out a question in the hope of eliciting his name.

“He was horribly ungracious and rude,” she added, “and yet he didn’t look in the least the sort of man who would be like that.  There was no lack of breeding about him.  He was just deliberately snubby—­as though I had no right to exist on the same planet with him—­anyway”—­laughing—­“not in the same railway compartment.”

Molly nodded sagely.

“I believe I know whom you mean.  Was he a lean, brown, grim-looking individual, with the kind of eyes that almost make you jump when they look at you suddenly?”

“That certainly describes them,” admitted Sara, smiling faintly.