“I’ll look at you as long as you’ll let me,” gulped Tommy, and he was boy enough and man enough to put a hand on each of her shoulders, and drown his longing in her brimming eyes.

. . . . .

Mary and Miss Vanderpoel were talking with a curious intimacy, in another part of the garden, where they were together alone, Sir Nigel having been reattached to Lady Alanby.

“You have known Sir Thomas a long time?” Betty had just said.

“Since we were children.  Jane reminded me at the Dunholms’ ball that she had played cricket with him when she was eight.”

“They have always liked each other?” Miss Vanderpoel suggested.

Mary looked up at her, and the meeting of their eyes was frank to revelation.  But for the clear girlish liking for herself she saw in Betty Vanderpoel’s, Mary would have known her next speech to be of imbecile bluntness.  She had heard that Americans often had a queer, delightful understanding of unconventional things.  This splendid girl was understanding her.

“Oh!  You see!” she broke out.  “You left them together on purpose!”

“Yes, I did.”  And there was a comprehension so deep in her look that Mary knew it was deeper than her own, and somehow founded on some subtler feeling than her own.  “When two people want so much—­care so much to be together,” Miss Vanderpoel added quite slowly—­even as if the words rather forced themselves from her, “it seems as if the whole world ought to help them—­everything in the world—­the very wind, and rain, and sun, and stars—­oh, things have no right to keep them apart.”

Mary stared at her, moved and fascinated.  She scarcely knew that she caught at her hand.

“I have never been in the state that Jane is,” she poured forth.  “And I can’t understand how she can be such a fool, but—­but we care about each other more than most girls do—­perhaps because we have had no people.  And it’s the kind of thing there is no use talking against, it seems.  It’s killing the youngness in her.  If it ends miserably, it will be as if she had had an illness, and got up from it a faded, done-for spinster with a stretch of hideous years to live.  Her blue eyes will look like boiled gooseberries, because she will have cried all the colour out of them.  Oh!  You understand!  I see you do.”

Before she had finished both Miss Vanderpoel’s hands were holding hers.

“I do!  I do,” she said.  And she did, as a year ago she had not known she could.  “Is it Lady Alanby?” she ventured.

“Yes.  Tommy will be helplessly poor if she does not leave him her money.  And she won’t if he makes her angry.  She is very determined.  She will leave it to an awful cousin if she gets in a rage.  And Tommy is not clever.  He could never earn his living.  Neither could Jane.  They could never marry.  You can’t defy relatives, and marry on nothing, unless you are a character in a book.”