riorated her, and I was wondering if Owen Ransome is not to blame for it. Perhaps, after all, she is not happy with him."

"Oh, but I know they 're happy," exclaimed Joy, and then for the first time a curious doubt came into her mind. Were they, after all, so happy? She had both their words for it. Owen had said, "Of course ours is the ideal marriage," and Julia had said, "I am the luckiest woman in the world." They were undoubtedly in love. Could people be unhappy and yet in love if they were married?

The Ransomes were secure, good people with regular habits, blessed by twins, and respected by the world around them. These landmarks in a changing universe surely never deceived.

"I don't quite see," Mrs. Featherstone observed thoughtfully, "how Julia came to fall off the roof. She was always so sure-footed."

Joy laughed aloud at this.

"Oh, come, Mummy darling," she said, "you don't really think Owen pushed her off the roof, do you?"

Mrs. Featherstone shook her head. She smiled, too; but she did not say what else she had thought. She only ended by agreeing rather reluctantly that Joy should go to Julia for a few weeks. She would not have given her consent at all if she had not known that Nicolas and Maude were to return in a few days' time. Even though she had just said that nothing further could be said about Nicolas, once he was married, she realized that it was better Joy should not be exposed to seeing the final certainty too vividly presented to her until habit had made the situation easier all round.

Mrs. Featherstone had never mentioned the subject to Joy, but it is probable that she knew all there was to know. She had been annoyed by Julia's letter, but she had not been startled. She put her hand rather shyly on Joy's shoulder as she watched her turn to leave the room.

"My dear," she said, "I don't want to bother you, but one cannot live to my age and not know a little about life. Perhaps it would be a comfort to you to know that things that happen, however painful they are at the time, do not matter very much for long. Only how we behave to them matters. That matters very much indeed, and it lasts always."

Joy would have liked to say: "O Mother, but Nick is n't like that. He minds without stopping." For the only thing Joy felt really unbearable was Nick's tears. But before she had time to say his name, Mrs. Featherstone had pushed her very gently from the room. She did not want to hear his name even uttered. Nicolas was Maude's business now, and silence would teach Joy quickest that Nicolas was Maude's business.

X

It was late in the afternoon of a dull October day when Joy returned to Pollards. It had been raining for some time, and the air was full of the earthy smell of wet leaves. The dark clouds banked high over the brown, sodden foliage and the chill wind that blew against her face gave her a feeling of something sinister and disheartening. The long terrace, immaculately cleared from leaves, looked stale and empty. Pots of chrysanthemums and asters in their stiff rows had a frightened, apologetic air, as if

they were guests invited at the last moment to take the place of chosen friends. Pollards was not a house which could sink softly under a load of creepers; it stood big and bald, staring out flatly across its empty garden beds.

Joy felt, looking around her uncertainly in the gathering dusk, as if the house had no inner life in it. It was strange that Owen, who so understood intimacy, should have bought a "residence" and not a "house"; or was it perhaps Julia who had so wholly failed to transform it into what it should have been?

Joy suddenly became aware that the terrace was no longer empty. A figure was advancing toward her whom she mistook for a moment for Julia until she remembered that Julia could not walk. It was a much smaller figure than Julia's, but it advanced upon Joy with all the decision of a hostess.

"You 're Miss Featherstone," the young person asserted in a clipped, familiar tone. "Do come in and have some tea before you go up to Mrs. Ransome. I'm Nina Mullory, Owen Ransome's secretary."

Miss Mullory was different from any one Joy had ever seen before. She

had an air of more decision and less grace. She wore a provocative cherrycolored hat drawn rather markedly over one eye; her dress had those accentuated points of fashion which catch and haunt the attention without pleasing it. Her small, tip-tilted face was accentuated, too. Joy thought that Miss Mullory had very red lips for cheeks that managed to be so unnaturally white, and there was something odd about her eyebrows, as if they might have belonged more reasonably to a different face.

But it struck Joy even more that though Miss Mullory was obviously young, she had none of the disabilities of youth. It was in Joy that these disabilities instantly appeared. She felt aware that she had never been so shy before; it was as if she had to be shyer than usual to make up for the aggressive ease of Miss Mullory. Joy wanted to go to Julia at once, but she could n't make up her mind to say so. She stood there tentative and helpless while Miss Mullory gave rather sharp orders as to what was to be done with her boxes.

"It's beastly damp," Miss Mullory observed over her shoulder to Joy, with some impatience. "Do come in." Joy followed her submissively into

"It might be worse," she said, with a laugh. "Don't you think he 's awfully nice?"

Joy put down her tea-cup. She was very shy, but she was not timid, and she knew that she did not intend to discuss Owen with Miss Mullory.

"His wife is my greatest friend," she said quietly. “I think I have taken for granted that he was nice."

"Well, that's a funny way of looking at men," said Miss Mullory, defensively. "I don't see what difference his wife can make, anyway. Either a man's jolly or he is n't."

"I will go up now and see Mrs. Ransome," said Joy. "Thank you so much for giving me my tea."

The other girl leaned back in her chair and stared hard at her. Was this a declaration of war already? Did this very countrified creature, without a sense of the chief values of life, intend to snub a person who had been so extremely successful in "picking up a thing or two"? It almost looked like it, for though Joy's voice was extraordinarily gentle and she had smiled when she spoke, she got up quite decisively and left the room.

Miss Mullory frowned at Joy's departing figure. There were several important items of information which she had intended to extract from her in their first interview, and she had not extracted them. She had an uneasy sense that even though Joy was a fool, she was not going to be an easy one to handle. She had looked like a child and dressed like a child, but there was in the sudden steadiness of Joy's eyes when she suspected impertinence a quite curious likeness to Julia Ransome's eyes, and Miss Mullory had already met them once too often.

Joy ran up unannounced to the nursery. The twins were having their baths. It was an exquisite spectacle. They were sixteen months old now and could frankly participate in, or even more frankly resist, all the processes of life. Baths were the crowning-point of their day. Safe in expert hands, they trampled, crowed, and plunged in broad and spacious seas of warmth and buoyancy. They drifted with the tide, they fought convulsively with sponges; soap threatened and discomfited them momentarily, to sink with a roar into the oblivion of the past.

Pink, wet, and shining, they were at length withdrawn to broad knees and scrubbed with soft towels. They waved their legs in the air and shrieked a few well-chosen, but half-hearted, shrieks to show that they preferred the element of water, even though they admitted that the element of earth was no unsound invention. Sweetscented powder was sprinkled over their finely manipulated persons. Refreshed and drowsy, they submitted in a kindly spirit to Joy's embraces, and let her carry them triumphantly to bed. Nurse was delighted to see Joy again, and gave her the crowded history of the twins' last two months. It did not strike Joy till afterward that neither Miss Mullory nor nurse had said anything about Julia's accident.

Julia's room, immaculately tidy, was very light and large. There was fresh air in every corner of it. Julia, propped up on an immense expanse of white pillow, looked peculiarly erect and fine. She had always impressed Joy as a being of inordinate daintiness, like the very finest Dresden china or the most carefully drawn and delicate old lace. There are beauties who

could be planted and shine equally in any class of life, but Julia's beauty was singularly select. She could have been found only in an old and privileged order; the cut of her nostrils, the chiseled lids of her clear, fine eyes, had as unmistakable a look of breeding as the careful points of a race-horse.

She looked as frail as a flower, but she was in reality intensely strong. Nothing could change Julia; certainly falling off a house had n't. Her eyes lit with pleasure as they rested on Joy, and then a curious shadow passed over her face again, as if even over her pleasure in Joy she had to set a guard.

"My dear," she cried out gaily, "ring for tea. You must be dead after that abysmal journey."

"No," said Joy; "I had my tea down-stairs, thanks. A Miss Mullory gave it to me."

"Oh, yes," said Julia, indifferently; "Owen's new secretary. I am glad she had the sense. What did you think of her?"

Joy sat down close to the bed. She looked very steadily at Julia. Her beauty was unchanged, but it seemed to Joy as if a touch of something cold and hard, like frost, had been passed over it. She felt as she had felt when the wind had met her on the terrace, as if there was the chill of something cruel in the air.

"I don't think," she said consideringly, "I have ever seen a secretary before."

Julia laughed.

"My dear," she said, "you speak as if we had introduced you to a mastodon. There are a great many secretaries, but I am told they differ. You are at liberty to dislike this one, I believe, but not before Owen. Owen's secretaries have several stages. They

"Never," said Julia, lightly. "Nothing in the world is more satisfactory than a broken leg. Everybody believes in it. There it is, you see, a presentable handicap, perfectly easy to explain. 'Poor thing, she's broken her leg!' I rather like that type of sympathy. If people said, 'Poor thing, what she 's really suffering from is a broken nose,'-the kind, you know, put out of joint by the attractions of others,-well, then one would resent it, would n't one? But if there is such a thing as pure pity, I am sure it is reserved for broken legs. Mine is healing as rapidly as it can heal. I sha'n't even be lame."

There was no mystery about it, and yet Joy felt a curious reluctance to asking Julia how it happened.

"You've seen the twins, of course?" Julia asked lightly. "You love me, my dear, but you 'd see me hanged, drawn, and quartered before you'd let the twins suffer from a crumpled roseleaf, now, would n't you? It's curious, your passion for maternity. I remember when you were a tiny girl, you took nine dolls to bed with you and lay on the edge yourself. When the inevitable happened, it was always you that fell out."

"They're so helpless," Joy pleaded. "You can't do too much for babies."

"Grown-up people can be helpless, too," said Julia, "but not, I grant, so