the village street, and which gave it its name.

In a sense it was too much like a stage picture to please a really fine
taste. But to Enid Crofton it formed an ideal background for her
attractive self. She had sold for very high prices the sound, solid,
fine, 18th century furniture, which her husband had inherited, and with
the proceeds she had bought the less comfortable but to the taste of the
moment, more attractive oak furnishings of The Trellis House.

Enid Crofton was the kind of woman who acquires helpful admirers in every
profession. The junior partner of the big firm of house-agents who had
disposed of the lease of Fildy Fe Manor had helped her in every way
possible, though he had been rather surprised and puzzled, considering
that she knew no one there, at her determination to find a house in, or
near, the village of Beechfield.

It was also an admirer, the only one who had survived from her war
sojourn in Egypt--a cheery, happy, good-looking soldier, called Tremaine,
now at home on leave from India--who had helped her in the actual task of
settling in. Not that there had been much settling in to do--for the
house had been left in perfect order by its last tenant. But Captain
Tremaine had fetched her from the hotel where she had stayed in London;
he had bought her first-class ticket (Enid always liked someone to pay
for her); they had shared a delightful picnic lunch which he provided
in the train; and then, finally, reluctantly, he had left The Trellis
House--after a rather silly, tiresome, little scene, during which he had
vowed that she should marry him, even if it came to his kidnapping her
by force!

While hoping and waiting, in nervous suspense, for Godfrey Radmore, she
cast a tender thought to Bob Tremaine. Nothing, so she told herself with
a certain vehemence, would induce her to marry him, for he had only L200
a year beside his pay, and that, even in India, she believed would mean
poverty. Also she had been told that no woman remained really pretty in
India for very long. But she was fond of Tremaine--he was "her sort," and
far, far more her ideal of what a man should be than was the rich man she
had deliberately made up her mind to marry; but bitter experience had
convinced Enid Crofton that money--plenty of money--was as necessary to
her as the air she breathed.

* * * * *

Suddenly there broke on her ear the peal of an old-fashioned bell,
followed by a short, s