about you by pretending to be his comrade, and then throwing him over.
I've had more men in love with me, Anne, than you've seen in your life,
but I never did _that_."

"Oh Auntie, what about Father? And you were engaged to him."

"Well, anyhow," said Adeline, softened by the recollection, "I _was_
engaged."

She smiled her enchanting smile; and Anne, observing the breakdown of
dignity, got up off the bed and kissed her.

"I don't suppose," she said, "that Father was the only one."

"He wasn't. But then, with _me_, my dear, it was their own risk. They
knew where they were."

v

In March, nineteen eleven, Eliot went out to Central Africa. He stayed
there two years, investigating malaria and sleeping sickness. Then he
went on to the Straits Settlements and finally took a partnership in a
practice at Penang.

Anne left Wyck at Easter and returned in August because of Colin. Then
she went back to her Ilford farm.

The two years passed, and in the spring of the third year, nineteen
fourteen, she came again.

VI

QUEENIE

i

Something awful had happened. Adeline had told Anne about it.

It seemed that Colin in his second year at Cambridge, when he should
have given his whole mind to reading for the Diplomatic Service, had had
the imprudence to get engaged. And to a girl that Adeline had never
heard of, about whom nothing was known but that she was remarkably
handsome and that her family (Courthopes of Leicestershire) were, in
Adeline's brief phrase, "all right."

From the terrace they could see, coming up the lawn from the goldfish
pond, Colin and his girl.

Queenie Courthope. She came slowly, her short Russian skirt swinging out
from her ankles. The brilliance of her face showed clear at a distance,
vermilion on white, flaming; hard, crystal eyes, sweeping and flashing;
bobbed hair, brown-red, shining in the sun. Then a dominant, squarish
jaw, and a mouth exquisitely formed, but thin, a vermilion thread drawn
between her staring, insolent nostrils and the rise of her round chin.

This face in its approach expressed a profound, arrogant indifference to
Adeline and Anne. Only as it turned towards Colin its grey-black eyes
lowered and were soft dark under the black feathers of their brows.

Colin looked back at it with a shy, adoring tenderness.

Queenie could be even more superbly uninterested than Adeline. In
Adeline's self-absorption there was a passive innocence, a candor that
disarmed you