f I didn't know that much after going
to Germany, why--oh, Michael, I do think you're funny."

"I was afraid these beastly foreigners would spoil you," muttered
Michael.

"It's not the foreigners. It's myself."

"Stella!"

"Well, I'm fifteen and a half."

"I thought girls were innocent," said Michael with disillusion in his
tone.

"Girls grow older quicker than boys."

"But I mean always innocent," persisted Michael. "I don't mean all
girls, of course. But--well--a girl like you."

"Very innocent girls are usually very stupid girls," Stella asserted.

Michael made a resolution to watch his sister's behaviour when she came
back to London next year to make her first public appearance at a
concert. For the moment, feeling overmatched, he changed the trend of
his reproof.

"Well, even if you do talk about people not being married, I think it's
rotten to talk about mother like that."

"You stupid old thing, as if I should do it with anyone but you, and I
only talked about her to you because you look so sort of cosy and
confidential in these ferns."

"They're not ferns--they're bracken. If I thought such a thing was
possible," declared Michael, "I believe I'd go mad. I don't think I
could ever again speak to anybody I knew."

"Why not, if they didn't know?"

"How like a girl! Stella, you make me feel uncomfortable, you do
really."

Stella stretched her full length in the luxurious greenery.

"Well, mother never seems unhappy."

"Exactly," said Michael eagerly. "Therefore, what you think can't
possibly be true. If it were, she'd always look miserable."

"Well, then who _was_ our father?"

"Don't ask me," said Michael gloomily. "I believe he's in prison--or
perhaps he's in an asylum, or deformed."

Stella shuddered.

"Michael, what a perfectly horrible idea. Deformed!"

"Well, wouldn't you sooner he were deformed than that you were--than
that--than the other idea?" Michael stammered.

"No, I wouldn't," Stella cried. "I'd much, much, much rather that mother
was never married."

Michael tried to drag his mind towards the comprehension of this
unnatural sentiment, but the longer he regarded it the worse it seemed,
and with intense irony he observed to Stella:

"I suppose you'll be telling me next that you're in love."

"I'm not in love just at the moment," said Stella blandly.

"Do you mean to say you have been in love?"

"A good deal," she admitted.

Michael leaped to his feet, and looked d