It was on the morning they were leaving that a telegram was put into her hands. Mrs. Phillips was ill at lodgings in Folkestone. She hoped that Joan, on her way back, would come to see her. Joan expressed her thanks. She would like to have had more talk with the stern old lady, but was prevented by the entrance of two new comers. The first was Miss Lavery, a handsome, loud-toned young woman. She ran a nursing paper, but her chief interest was in the woman’s suffrage question, just then coming rapidly to the front. She had heard Joan speak at Cambridge and was eager to secure her adherence, being wishful to surround herself with a group of young and good-looking women who should take the movement out of the hands of the “frumps,” as she termed them. Her doubt was whether Joan would prove sufficiently tractable. She intended to offer her remunerative work upon the Nursing News without saying anything about the real motive behind, trusting to gratitude to make her task the easier.!

“Do I pose?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “We’ve never had a home exactly,” explained Mrs. Phillips, during their journey in the tram. “It’s always been lodgings, up to now. Nice enough, some of them; but you know what I mean; everybody else’s taste but your own. I’ve always fancied a little house with one’s own things in it. You know, things that you can get fond of.”

“So long as he doesn’t think that I came down specially to see him, I don’t mind,” said Joan. Poor fellow! She had come to understand that feeling. After all, it wasn’t altogether his fault that they had met. And she had been so cross to him! “No,” laughed Joan. “At least, I don’t think so.”