person to the
Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of
a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at
breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone
off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his
breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter
braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else.

Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene
men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so
slightly hurt.

Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels
when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was
he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was
it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her
as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom
he had to be polite?

She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her
mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her
antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her
mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever
succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the
household _menage_ at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely
critical of herself and her belongings.

She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a
necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes.

When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first
necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved
one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is
death.

Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with
him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a
lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven
o'clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that
she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss
Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far
more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a
creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss
Pinckney did n