Holly moved one hand shyly on her knee, and her glance dropped.

“You haven’t forgotten,” he said, suddenly gathering courage, “that we’re going mad-rabbiting together?”

Holly smiled.

“Oh!  That was only make-believe.  One can’t do that sort of thing after one’s grown up, you know.”

“Dash it! cousins can,” said Val.  “Next Long Vac.—­it begins in June, you know, and goes on for ever—­we’ll watch our chance.”

But, though the thrill of conspiracy ran through her veins, Holly shook her head.  “It won’t come off,” she murmured.

“Won’t it!” said Val fervently; “who’s going to stop it?  Not your father or your brother.”

At this moment Jolyon and Jolly came in; and romance fled into Val’s patent leather and Holly’s white satin toes, where it itched and tingled during an evening not conspicuous for open-heartedness.

Sensitive to atmosphere, Jolyon soon felt the latent antagonism between the boys, and was puzzled by Holly; so he became unconsciously ironical, which is fatal to the expansiveness of youth.  A letter, handed to him after dinner, reduced him to a silence hardly broken till Jolly and Val rose to go.  He went out with them, smoking his cigar, and walked with his son to the gates of Christ Church.  Turning back, he took out the letter and read it again beneath a lamp.

“Dear Jolyon,

“Soames came again to-night—­my thirty-seventh birthday.  You were right, I mustn’t stay here.  I’m going to-morrow to the Piedmont Hotel, but I won’t go abroad without seeing you.  I feel lonely and down-hearted.

“Yours affectionately,
“Irene.”

He folded the letter back into his pocket and walked on, astonished at the violence of his feelings.  What had the fellow said or done?

He turned into High Street, down the Turf, and on among a maze of spires and domes and long college fronts and walls, bright or dark-shadowed in the strong moonlight.  In this very heart of England’s gentility it was difficult to realise that a lonely woman could be importuned or hunted, but what else could her letter mean?  Soames must have been pressing her to go back to him again, with public opinion and the Law on his side, too!  ‘Eighteen-ninety-nine!,’ he thought, gazing at the broken glass shining on the top of a villa garden wall; ’but when it comes to property we’re still a heathen people!  I’ll go up to-morrow morning.  I dare say it’ll be best for her to go abroad.’  Yet the thought displeased him.  Why should Soames hunt her out of England!  Besides, he might follow, and out there she would be still more helpless against the attentions of her own husband!  ‘I must tread warily,’ he thought; ’that fellow could make himself very nasty.  I didn’t like his manner in the cab the other night.’  His thoughts turned to his daughter June.  Could she help?  Once on a time Irene had been her