here's a wood about a quarter of a mile farther on. We can get out of
the wind there."

Michael resented Stella's pleasantness. He wanted her to be angry and so
launch him easily upon the grievances he had been storing up for a
fortnight.

"I hate badly trained dogs," he grumbled when Stella turned round to
whistle vainly for one of the spaniels.

"So do I," she agreed.

It was really unfair of her to effect a deadlock by being perpetually
and unexpectedly polite. He would try being gracious himself: it was
easier in the shelter of the wood.

"I don't think I've properly thanked you for having us to stay down
here," he began.

Stella stopped dead in the middle of the glade:

"Look here, do you want me to talk about this business?" she demanded.

Her use of the word "business" annoyed him: it crystallized all the
offensiveness, as he was now calling it to himself, of her sisterly
attitude these two weeks.

"I shall be delighted to talk about this 'business.' Though why you
should refer to my engagement as if a hot-water pipe had burst, I don't
quite know."

"Do you want me to speak out frankly--to say exactly what I think of you
and Lily and of your marrying her? You won't like it, and I won't do it
unless you ask me."

"Go on," said Michael gloomily. Stella had gathered the dogs round her
again, and in this glade she appeared to Michael as a severe Artemis
with her short tweed skirt and her golf-coat swinging from her shoulders
like a chlamys. These oaks were hers: the starry moss was hers: the
anemones flushing and silvering to the ground wind, they were all hers.
It suddenly struck him as monstrously unfair that Stella should be able
to criticize Lily. Here she stood on her own land forever secure against
the smallest ills that could come to the other girl; and, with this
consciousness of a strength behind her, already she was conveying that
rustic haughtiness of England. Michael loved her, this cool and
indomitable mistress of Hardingham; but while he loved her, almost he
hated her for the power she had to look down on Lily. Michael wished he
had Sylvia with him. That would have been a royal battle in this wood.
Stella with her dogs and trees behind her, with her green acres all
round her and the very wind fighting for her, might yet have found it
difficult to discomfit Sylvia.

"Go on, I'm waiting for you to begin," Michael repeated.

"Straight off, then," she said, "I may as well tell you that this