“Are they yours?” she asked. She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as “Allway’s Folly.” Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them—when she did not forget to do so—in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.!

“It’s just a homely affair,” she explained. She had recovered her form and was now quite the lady again. “Two other guests beside yourself: a Mr. Airlie—I am sure you will like him. He’s so dilletanty—and Mr. McKean. He’s the young man upstairs. Have you met him?” “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.”

He was choosing his roses. They held their petals wrapped tight round them, trying to keep the cold from their brave hearts. In the warmth they would open out and be gay, until the end. “So this is our new recruit,” she said. “She is come to bring healing to the sad, sick world—to right all the old, old wrongs.” The firelight showed to Joan a comically frightened face, with round, staring eyes and an open mouth.