pe.

She wondered if he would come alone the first time, or if one of
the girls would accompany him. She felt just a little afraid of
Rosamund--Rosamund was so very pretty with all the added, evanescent
charm of extreme youth. She told herself that it was lucky that she,
Enid, and Godfrey Radmore were already friends, and good friends too.

Twice she went up into her bedroom and gave a long, searching, anxious
look at herself in the narrow panel mirror which she had fixed on to one
of the cupboard doors. That there is no truer critic of herself, and of
her appearance, than a very pretty woman, is generally true even of the
vainest and most self-confident of her sex.

Enid Crofton had put on a white serge skirt, and a white woolen jumper,
the only concession to her new widowhood being that the white jumper was
bordered in pale grey of a shade that matched her shoes and stockings.
Though her anxious surveys of herself had been reassuring, she felt
nervous, and a trifle despondent. She did not like the country--the
stillness even of village life got on her nerves. Still, Beechfield was
very different from the horribly lonely house in Essex to which she
never returned willingly in her thoughts--though sometimes certain
memories of all that had happened there would thrust themselves upon her,
refusing to be denied.

Fortunately for the new occupant of The Trellis House, a certain type of
prettiness gives its lucky possessor an extraordinary sense of assurance
and tranquillity when dealing with the average man. Enid Crofton wasn't
quite sure, however, if Godfrey Radmore was an average man. He had never
made love to her in those pleasant, now far-away days in Egypt, when
every other unattached man did so. That surely proved him to be somewhat
peculiar.

During the whole of her not very long life she had been petted and
spoilt, admired and sheltered, by almost everyone with whom fate had
brought her in contact.

Enid Crofton's father had been a paymaster in the Royal Navy named
Joseph Catlin. After his death she and her mother had lived on in
Southsea till the girl was sixteen, when her mother had pronounced
her quite old enough to be "out." Mrs. Catlin was still too attractive
herself to feel her daughter a rival, and the two years which had
followed had been delightful years to them both. Then something which
they regarded as most romantic occurred. On the day Enid was eighteen,
and her mother thirty-seven, there had b