he came in on an excited speech from Howard, and heard it
all.

The result was that instead of Lily going to them with her confession,
she was summoned, to find her family a unit for once and combined
against her. She was not to see Louis Akers again, or the Doyles.

They demanded a promise, but she refused. Yet even then, standing before
them, forced to a defiance she did not feel, she was puzzled as well
as angry. They were wrong, and yet in some strange way they were right,
too. She was Cardew enough to get their point of view. But she was
Cardew enough, too, to defy them.

She did it rather gently.

"You must understand," she said, her hands folded in front of her, "that
it is not so much that I care to see the people you are talking about.
It is that I feel I have the right to choose my own friends."

"Friends!" sneered old Anthony. "A third-rate lawyer, a--"

"That is not the point, grandfather. I went away to school when I was a
little girl. I have been away for five years. You cannot seem to realize
that I am a woman now, not a child. You bring me in here like a bad
child."

In the end old Anthony had slammed out of the room. There were arguments
after that, tears on Grace's part, persuasion on Howard's; but Lily had
frozen against what she considered their tyranny, and Howard found in
her a sort of passive resistance, that drove him frantic.

"Very well," he said finally. "You have the arrogance of youth, and its
cruelty, Lily. And you are making us all suffer without reason."

"Don't you think I might say that too, father?"

"Are you in love with this man?"

"I have only seen him four times. If you would give me some reasons for
all this fuss--"

"There are things I cannot explain to you. You wouldn't understand."

"About his moral character?"

Howard was rather shocked. He hesitated:

"Yes."

"Will you tell me what they are?"

"Good heavens, no!" he exploded. "The man's a radical, too. That in
itself ought to be enough."

"You can't condemn a man for his political opinions."

"Political opinions!"

"Besides," she said, looking at him with her direct gaze, "isn't there
some reason in what the radicals believe, father? Maybe it is a dream
that can't come true, but it is rather a fine dream, isn't it?"

It was then that Howard followed his father's example, and flung out of
the room.

After that Lily went, very deliberately and without secrecy, to the
house on Cardew Way. She found a