n love with him, and had been eating her heart out all this
time. That was almost amusing. She had never, even in their days of
greatest friendship, asked him into her room before, though he had often
suggested coming.

"Why, Pierrette, of course," he said. Then he laughed out loud. "And
I'll bring some red roses, afterwards we will go out to supper, and it
shall be like old times."

"Afterwards," Joan repeated. The excitement had left her, she sounded on
the instant very tired, "I don't know about afterwards, but bring the
red roses and come at half-past four, will you?" She stood up, "I must
go home," she said, "I have got to pack and get everything ready before
to-morrow."

He could not understand her mood in the least, but he could draw his own
conclusions from her invitation. It set him whistling softly on his way
home. The tune he selected was one that was being played everywhere in
London at the time. It fitted into his thoughts excellently:

"Just a little love, a little kiss,
I will give my life for this."

Poor, silly little Pierrette! Why had she fought with him before and
wasted so much precious time? As a matter of fact, he broke off his
whistle as the startling truth flashed on him, he might quite easily
have forgotten all about her in the interval, and then where would she
have been?

CHAPTER XXV

"I have left you behind
In the path of the past;
With the white breath of flowers,
With the best of God's hours,
I have left you at last."

DORA SIGERSON.

Mrs. Carew was in a state of discontent which amounted almost to anger.

"I knew such kind of things were bound to happen," she grumbled
fiercely, "if she joined in with a girl like that Miss Bellairs. I have
never held and I never will hold with young ladies having men to tea in
their bedrooms."

"Why don't you just tell her so?" suggested her helpmate from his
customary entrenched position in an armchair behind the newspaper. "It
would be a good deal cheaper than breaking the kitchen china, Maria."

"Tell her!" snorted Mrs. Carew. "She don't give me a chance. Cool as a
cucumber she turns to me this morning, she says: 'Oh, I've two gentlemen
to tea this afternoon, Mrs. Carew, just show them up when they come.'
Then she 'ops it out of the front door like a rabbit. 'Gentlemen,'
indeed, and she with not so much as a screen round her bed."

"Perhaps they are