the carriage wheels on the gravel of the
drive. She took off her gardening gloves and came to meet them.
Arthur jumped down from the carriage and kissed his mother. Gabrielle,
also approaching her, put up her face to be kissed, and Mrs. Payne, who
could not very well refuse her, felt that the kiss was a kind of
betrayal. She wished, in her instinctive honesty, that it could have
been avoided.

It was a bad beginning, and gave her a hint of the kind of emotional
conflict that she had let herself in for when she assumed the role of
detective. What made it a hundred times worse was the fact that she
really liked kissing Gabrielle, for her kindly heart warmed to the girl
again as it had warmed when first they met. "I'm sentimental," she
thought, "for heaven's sake let us get it over!"

Gabrielle, however, was quite unconscious of the struggle that divided
Mrs. Payne's breast. She was a child launched on a holiday with the
friend of her choice in the most delightful season of the year. She
didn't scent any hostility in the atmosphere of Overton; and this was
strange in a person who moved through life by the aid of intuitions
rather than reasons. She felt contented at Overton, just as she had
felt contented at Roscarna. She was more at home there than she could
ever have been at Lapton or Clonderriff; her mind was as sensitive to
sky changes as the surface of a lonely lake. Mrs. Payne had given her
an airy bedroom facing west, and while the maid unpacked her things
Gabrielle stood at the window looking out over meadows, golden in the
low sun. Beneath her lay the lawns, smooth and kempt and of a rich, an
almost Irish green, on which the black shadows of cedar branches were
spread. A tall hedge of privet divided the lawns from the vegetable
garden in which a man was working methodically. She saw the pattern of
paths and hedges from above as though they were lines in a picture. In
the middle of the lawn stood a square of clipped yew trees, making a
hollow chamber of the kind that formal gardeners call a yew-parlour,
with a stone sundial in the middle of it. "What a jolly place for
children to play in," she thought. A blackbird broke into a whistle in
the privet hedge and brought her heart to her mouth. Could any
nightingale sing sweeter?

"I think that is all, madam," said the maid demurely. Gabrielle smiled
at her and thanked her, and the girl smiled back. Like everything else
in Mrs. Payne's admirably man