the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by
its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.

"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I
suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a
long letter."

"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for
his wife.

Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It
held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of
foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been
scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written
anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was
writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own
handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own
eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.

"I--I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.

"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written?
You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say
tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that when that
happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I
recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."

"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly.
"She always follows your advice, you know. It--it's only scrabbles."

He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely
puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had
written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made
out: "You are only miserab ..."--the words were interspersed with really
illegible scrawls--"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want
to ... Mild ..."

Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"

He scribbled with his pencil: "You."

She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."

Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at
odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was
really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she
exclaimed:

"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go
dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."

Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt
Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth
g