sation for him. It made him distinctly uncomfortable--almost ashamed.
A gift of this sort, even though it hasn't been desired, puts the
recipient under an obligation. When once a woman has dubbed a man "a
dear," she expects him to live up to the part she has assigned him. Tabs
hoped that she hadn't been as sincere as she had sounded.

Taking himself off to the nearest French window, he stood staring out
morosely--staring out at the silly little rockery, with the silly little
pond at the foot of it, containing the silly little boat that never
sailed anywhere. He was cross with himself and even more cross with her.
Why couldn't she have behaved sensibly, instead of bursting like a
rain-cloud without warning? She made mysteries out of everything, out of
himself, Terry and even her sister's portrait. She never gave him a
complete answer to any question. She surrounded herself with the
atmosphere of a detective novel. He was half-minded to rush into the
hall and make good his escape before she involved him further. Sir
Tobias could come and conduct his own unpleasantness. How on earth was
he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a
dear"?

But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a
quite different emotion--an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as
she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It
was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her
shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.

He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her
voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky.
I'm better now."

"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.

As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded
towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."

"Wouldn't she?"

He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no
attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where
he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever
happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with
her.

In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head
vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even
when we were children we couldn't make her."

It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was
intended as