of ten days or more, Audrey had
vanished like an illusion. She was not afraid of her mother; and she could
trust Miss Ingate, though Miss Ingate and Mrs. Moze were dangerously
intimate; but she was too self-conscious to remain in the presence of her
fellow-creatures; and in spite of her faith in Miss Ingate she thought of
the spinster as of a vase filled now with a fatal liquor which by any
accident might spill and spread ruin--so that she could scarcely bear to
look upon Miss Ingate.

At the back of the house a young Pomeranian dog, which had recently solaced
Miss Ingate in the loss of a Pekingese done to death by a spinster's
too-nourishing love, was prancing on his four springs round the chained
yard-dog, his friend and patron. In a series of marvellous short bounds, he
followed Audrey with yapping eagerness down the slope of the garden; and
the yard-dog, aware that none but the omnipotent deity, Mr. Moze, sole
source of good and evil, had the right to loose him, turned round once and
laid himself flat and long on the ground, sighing.

The garden, after developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a
scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the
sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green
meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody
was watching her.

Flank Hall, which for a hundred years had been called "the new hall," was a
seemly Georgian residence, warm in colour, with some quaint woodwork; and
like most such buildings in Essex, it made a very happy marriage with the
landscape. Its dormers and fine chimneys glowed amid the dark bare trees,
and they alone would have captivated a Londoner possessing those precious
attributes, fortunately ever spreading among the enlightened
middle-classes, a motor-car, a cultured taste in architecture, and a desire
to enter the squirearchy. Audrey loathed the house. For her it was the last
depth of sordidness and the commonplace. She could imagine positively
nothing less romantic. She thought of the ground floor on chill March
mornings with no fires anywhere save a red gleam in the dining-room, and
herself wandering about in it idle, at a loss for a diversion, an ambition,
an effort, a real task; and she thought of the upper floor, a mainly
unoccupied wilderness of iron bedsteads and yellow chests of drawers and
chipped earthenware and islands of carpets, and her mother plaintively and
wea