The cottage was larger than most, with a timbered front and a thatched roof. Standing at the gate, Richard Gordon stopped to admire. The house dated back to the days of Elizabeth, but his interest and admiration were not those of the antiquary.

    Nor, though he loved flowers, of the horticulturist, though the broad garden was a patchwork of colour and the fragrance of cabbage roses came to delight his senses. Nor was it the air of comfort and cleanliness that pervaded the place, the scrubbed red-brick pathway that led to the door, the spotless curtains behind leaded panes.

    It was the girl, in the red-lined basket chair, that arrested his gaze. She sat on a little lawn in the shade of a mulberry tree, with her shapely young limbs stiffly extended, a book in her hand, a large box of chocolates by her side. Her hair, the colour of old gold, an old gold that held life and sheen; a flawless complexion, and, when she turned her head in his direction, a pair of grave, questioning eyes, deeper than grey, yet greyer than blue…

    She drew up her feet hurriedly and rose.

    "I'm so sorry to disturb you,"—Dick, hat in hand, smiled his apology—"but I want water for my poor little Lizzie. She's developed a prodigious thirst."

    She frowned for a second, and then laughed.

    "Lizzie—you mean a car? If you'll come to the back of the cottage I'll show you where the well is."

    He followed, wondering who she was. The tiny hint of patronage in her tone he understood. It was the tone of matured girlhood addressing a boy of her own age. Dick, who was thirty and looked eighteen, with his smooth, boyish face, had been greeted in that "little boy" tone before, and was inwardly amused.

    "Here is the bucket and that is the well," she pointed. "I would send a maid to help you, only we haven't a maid, and never had a maid, and I don't think ever shall have a maid!"

    "Then some maid has missed a very good job," said Dick, "for this garden is delightful."

    She neither agreed nor dissented. Perhaps she regretted the familiarity she had shown. She conveyed to him an impression of aloofness, as she watched the process of filling the buckets, and when he carried them to the car on the road outside, she followed.

    "I thought it was a—a—what did you call it—Lizzie?"

    "She is Lizzie to me," said Dick stoutly as he filled the radiator of the big Rolls, "and she will never be anything else. There are people who think she should be called Diana,' but those high-flown names never had any attraction for me. She is Liz—and will always be Liz."

    She walked round the machine, examining it curiously.

    "Aren't you afraid to be driving a big car like that?" she asked. "I should be scared to death. It is so tremendous and…and unmanageable."

    Dick paused with a bucket in hand.

    "Fear," he boasted, "is a word which I have expunged from the bright lexicon of my youth."

    For a second puzzled, she began to laugh softly.

    "Did you come by way of Welford?" she asked.

    He nodded.

    "I wonder if you saw my father on the road?"

    "I saw nobody on the road except a sour-looking gentleman of middle age who was breaking the Sabbath by carrying a large brown box on his back."

    "Where did you pass him?" she asked, interested.

    "Two miles away—less than that." And then, a doubt intruding: "I hope that I wasn't describing your parent?"

    "It sounds rather like him," she said without annoyance. "Daddy is a naturalist photographer. He takes moving pictures of birds and things—he is an amateur, of course."

    "Of course," agreed Dick.

    He brought the buckets back to where he had found them and lingered. Searching for an excuse, he found it in the garden. How far he might have exploited this subject is a matter for conjecture. Interruption came in the shape of a young man who emerged from the front door of the cottage. He was tall and athletic, good-looking…Dick put his age at twenty.

    "Hello, Ella! Father back?" he began, and then saw the visitor.

    "This is my brother," said the girl, and Dick Gordon nodded. He was conscious that this free-and-easy method of getting acquainted was due largely, if not entirely, to his youthful appearance. To be treated as an inconsiderable boy had its advantages. And so it appeared.

    "I was telling him that boys ought not to be allowed to drive big cars," she said. "You remember the awful smash there was at the Shoreham cross roads?"

    Ray Bennett chuckled.

    "This is all part of a conspiracy to keep me from getting a motor-bicycle. Father thinks I'll kill somebody, and Ella thinks I'll kill myself."

    Perhaps there was something in Dick Gordon's quick smile that warned the girl that she had been premature in her appraisement of his age, for suddenly, almost abruptly, she nodded an emphatic dismissal and turned away. Dick was at the gate when a further respite arrived. It was the man he had passed on the road.