Joan fulfilled all Joe Bray's requirements. She was a member of the family. Her mother had been a Narth. Before he had put the letter down, Letty had pressed the bell on the table and the butler came in.

    "Tell Miss Bray to come here, Palmer," she said, and three minutes later a girl walked into the library—the sacrifice which the House of Narth designed to propitiate the gods of fortune.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

 

    Joan Bray was twenty-one, but looked younger. She was slim—Letty was in the habit of describing her as 'painfully thin', without good reason. The Narths were full-faced, full-chinned people, fair-headed and a trifle lethargic. Joan was supple of body and vital. Every movement of her was definite, intentional. In repose she had the poise of an aristocrat. ("She always knows where to put her hands," admitted Letty reluctantly.) In movement she had the lithe ease of one whom movement was a joy. Ten years of snubbing, of tacit suppression, of being put away and out of sight when she was not required, had neither broken her spirit nor crushed her confidence.

    She stood now, a half-smile in the grey eyes that laughed very readily, looking from one to the other, realizing that something had happened which was out of the ordinary. Her colour had a delicacy that the bold beauty of her cousins could not eclipse, nor yet set off, for she was as a picture that needed no lighting or contrasts to reveal its wonders.

    "Good evening, Mr Narth." She had always called him by the formal title. "I've finished the quarter's accounts, and they are terrific!"

    At any other time Stephen would have writhed at the news, but the sense of coming fortune made the question of a hundred pounds, more or less, a matter of supreme indifference.

    "Sit down, Joan," he said, and wonderingly she pulled up a chair and sat sideways upon it, resting one arm on the back.

    "Will you read this letter?" He passed it across to Letty who handed it to the girl.

    She read in silence, and when she had finished, smiled.

    "That's awfully good news. I'm very glad," she said, and looked quizzically from one girl to the other. "And who is the lovely bride to be?"

    Her unconquerable cheerfulness was an offence in the eyes of Mabel at the best of times. Now the cool assumption that one or other of them was to efface herself in the obscurity of a Chinese town, brought the red to her full neck.

    "Don't be stupid, Joan," she said sharply. "This is a very serious question——"

    "My dear"—Stephen saw the need for tact—"Clifford Lynne is a very good fellow—one of the best," he said enthusiastically, though he had no more knowledge of Clifford Lynne's character, appearance or general disposition than he had of any labourer his car had passed that afternoon. "This is one of the greatest chances that has ever—er—come our way. As a matter of fact," he said very carefully, "this is not the only letter I have had from dear old Joseph. There was another which—urn—put his view more clearly."

    She looked as though she expected him to pass this mysterious letter to her, but he did not, for the simple reason that it had no existence except in his imagination.

    "The truth is, my dear, Joseph wishes you to marry this man."

    The girl rose slowly to her feet, her thinly pencilled eyebrows gathered in a frown of amazement.

    "He wishes me to marry him?" she repeated. "But I don't know the man."

    "Neither do we," said Letty calmly. "It isn't a question of knowing. Anyway, how do you know any fellow you are going to marry? You see a man for a few minutes every day and you haven't the slightest idea what his nature is. It is only when you are married that his real self comes out."

    She was not making matters any easier for Mr Narth, and with a nod he silenced her.

    "Joan," he said, "I have been very good to you—I've given you a home, and I've done something more than that, as you well know."

    He looked at the girls and signalled them out of the room. When the door had closed on Letty:

    "Joan, I am going to be very frank with you," he said.

    It was not the first time he had been frank, and she could guess what was coming. She once had a brother, a wild, irresponsible youth, who had been employed by Narth Brothers, and had left hurriedly, carrying with him the cash contents of the safe—a few hundreds of pounds. He had expiated the crime with his life—for he was found on a Kentish road dead by the wreckage of the car in which he was making his way to a Channel port. And there was an invalid mother of Joan Bray's whose last years of life had been supported on Mr Narth's bounty. ("We can't let her go to the workhouse, father," Mabel had said; "if it gets into the newspapers there will be an awful scandal"—Mabel was Mabel even at the tender age of sixteen.)

    "It is not for me to remind you of what I have done for your family," began Stephen—and proceeded to remind her. "I have given you a home and a social life which ordinarily would not have been yours.