wife desire to kiss me
sometimes, that I should ... repulse her."

Jan gasped.

"But I have the greatest objection, both on sanitary and moral grounds
to----"

"I can't imagine anyone _wanting_ to kiss you," Jan interrupted
furiously; "you're far too puffy and stippled."

And she ran from him as though an angry bull were after her.

Mr. Withells stood stock-still where he was, in pained astonishment.

He saw the fleeing fair one disappear into the distance and in the
shortest time on record he heard the clanging of her bicycle bell as she
scorched down his drive.

"Puffy and stippled"--"Puffy and stippled"!

Mr. Withells repeated to himself this rudely personal remark as he
walked slowly towards the house.

What could she mean?

And what in the world had he said to make her so angry?

Women were really most unaccountable.

He ascended his handsome staircase and went into his dressing-room, and
there he sought his looking-glass, which stood in the window, and
surveyed himself critically. Yes, his cheeks _were_ a bit puffy near the
nostrils, and, as is generally the case in later life, the pores of the
skin were a bit enlarged, but for all that he was quite a personable
man.

He sighed. Miss Ross, he feared, was not nearly so sensible as he had
thought.

It was distinctly disappointing.

* * * * *

For the first mile and a quarter Jan scorched all she knew. The angry
blood was thumping in her ears and she exclaimed indignantly at
intervals, "How dared he! How dared he!"

Then she punctured a tyre.

There was no hope of getting it mended till she reached Wren's End, when
Earley would do it for her. As she pushed her bicycle along the lane she
recovered her sense of humour and she laughed. And presently she became
aware of a faint, sweet, elusive perfume from some flowering shrub on
the other side of somebody's garden wall.

It strongly resembled the smell of a blossoming tree that grew on Ridge
Road, Malabar Hill. And in one second Jan was in Bombay, and was
standing in the moonlight, looking up into a face that was neither puffy
nor stippled nor prim; but young and thin and worn and very kind. And
the exquisite understanding of that moment came back to her, and her
eyes filled with tears.

Yet in another moment she was again demanding indignantly, "How dared
he!"

She went straight to her room when she got in, and, like Mr. Withells,
she went and looked at herse