let me
see Lily?

I dare you to let me see her. Be sporting.

Yours,

M. F.

To Lily he wrote:

Darling,

Meet me outside South Kensington Station any time from twelve to
three.

Michael.

Alone, of course.

Next day he waited three hours and a half for Lily, but she did not
come. All the time he spent in a second-hand bookshop with one eye on
the street. When he got home, he found a note from Sylvia:

Come to-morrow at twelve.

S. S.

Michael crumpled up the note and flung it triumphantly into the
waste-paper basket.

"I thought I should sting you into giving way," he exclaimed.

Mrs. Gainsborough opened the door to him, when he arrived.

"They've gone away, the demons!" was what she said.

Michael was conscious of the garden rimmed with hoar-frost stretching
behind her in a vista; and as he stared at this silver sparkling desert
he realized that Sylvia had inflicted upon him a crushing humiliation.

"Where have they gone?" he asked blankly.

"Oh, they never tell me where they get to. But they took their luggage.
There's a note for you from Sylvia. Come in, and I'll give it to you."

Michael followed her drearily along the gravel path.

"We shall be having the snowdrops before we know where we are," Mrs.
Gainsborough said.

"Very soon," he agreed. He would have assented if she had foretold
begonias to-morrow morning.

In the sitting-room Michael saw Sylvia's note, a bleak little envelope
waiting for him on that table-cloth. Mrs. Gainsborough left him to read
it alone. The old silence of the room haunted him again now, the silence
that was so much intensified by the canary hopping about his cage.
Almost he decided to throw the letter unread into the fire.

From every corner of the room the message of Sylvia's hostility was
stretching out toward him. "Sweet," said the canary. Michael tore open
the envelope and read:

Perhaps you'll admit that my influence is as strong as yours. You'd
much better give her up. In a way, I'm rather sorry for you, but
not enough to make me hand over Lily to you. Do realize, my dear
young thing, that you aren't even beginning to understand women. I
admit that there's precious little to understand in Lily. And for
that very reason, when even you begin to see through her beauty,
you'll hate her. Now _I_ hate to think of this happening. She's a
thousand times better o