e, and fell, hitting her forehead
against a trunk. The blow dazed and sobered her. 'It's idiotic,' she
thought; 'I'm a baby! I'll Just walk very slowly till I reach the edge.
I know it isn't a large wood!' She turned deliberately to face each
direction; solemnly selected that from which the muttering of the guns
seemed to come, and started again, moving very slowly with her hands
stretched out. Something rustled in the undergrowth, quite close; she
saw a pair of green eyes shining. Her heart jumped into her mouth. The
thing sprang--there was a swish of ferns and twigs, and silence. Noel
clasped her breast. A poaching cat! And again she moved forward. But
she had lost direction. 'I'm going round and round,' she thought. 'They
always do.' And the sinking scattered feeling of the "bushed" clutched at
her again. 'Shall I call?' she thought. 'I must be near the road. But
it's so babyish.' She moved on again. Her foot struck something soft. A
voice muttered a thick oath; a hand seized her ankle. She leaped, and
dragged and wrenched it free; and, utterly unnerved, she screamed, and
ran forward blindly.

V

No one could have so convinced a feeling as Jimmy Fort that he would be a
'bit of a makeshift' for Noel. He had spent the weeks after his
interview with her father obsessed by her image, often saying to himself
"It won't do. It's playing it too low down to try and get that child,
when I know that, but for her trouble, I shouldn't have a chance." He
had never had much opinion of his looks, but now he seemed to himself
absurdly old and dried-up in this desert of a London. He loathed the
Office job to which they had put him, and the whole atmosphere of
officialdom. Another year of it, and he would shrivel like an old apple!
He began to look at himself anxiously, taking stock of his physical
assets now that he had this dream of young beauty. He would be forty
next month, and she was nineteen! But there would be times too when he
would feel that, with her, he could be as much of a "three-year-old" as
the youngster she had loved. Having little hope of winning her, he took
her "past" but lightly. Was it not that past which gave him what chance
he had? On two things he was determined: He would not trade on her past.
And if by any chance she took him, he would never show her that he
remembered that she had one.

After writing to Gratian he had spent the week before his holiday began,
in an attempt to