able!
She shrank from it in every fibre of her being. Some day, perhaps, she
could steel herself to make the terrible surrender. But not now, not
yet!

"No! No!" she cried strickenly. "I can't marry you! Not so soon!
You must give me time--wait a little! Kitty--"

She struggled to break from him, but he held her fast.

"We needn't wait for Kitty to come back," he said.

"No." The door had opened immediately before he spoke and Kitty
herself came quickly into the room. "No," she answered him. "You
needn't wait for me to come back. I returned yesterday."

"Kitty!"

With a cry like some tortured captive thing Nan wrenched herself free
and fled to Kitty's side.

"Kitty! Tell him--tell him I can't marry him now! Not yet--oh, I
can't!"

Kitty patted her arm reassuringly.

"Don't worry," she answered. Then she turned to Roger.

"Your wedding will have to be postponed, Roger," she said Quietly.
"Nan's uncle died early this morning."

She watched the tense anger and suspicion die swiftly out of his eyes.
The death of a relative, necessarily postponing Nan's marriage,
appealed to that curious conventional strain in him, inherited from
Lady Gertrude.

"Lord St. John dead?" he repeated. "Nan, why didn't you tell me? I
should have understood if I'd known that. I wouldn't have worried
you." He was full of shocked contrition and remorse.

Kitty felt she had been disingenuous. But she had sheltered Nan from
the cave-man that dwelt in Roger--oddly at variance with the streak of
conventionality which lodged somewhere in his temperamental make-up.
And she was quite sure that, if Lord St. John knew, he would be glad
that his death should have succoured Nan, just as in life he had always
sought to serve her.

"I want Nan to come and stay with me for a time," pursued Kitty
steadily, on the principle of striking while the iron is hot. "Later
on I'll bring her down to Mallow, and later still we can talk about the
wedding. You'll have to wait some months, Roger."

He assented, and Nan, realising that it was his mother in him, for the
moment uppermost, making these concessions to convention, felt
conscious of a wild hysterical desire to burst out laughing. She made
a desperate effort to control herself.

The room seemed to be growing very dark. Far away in the sky--no, it
must be the ceiling--she could see the electric lights burning ever
more and more dimly as the waves of darkness surged round her, r