s afternoon
than she would have thought possible. Poor Jack! Poor, foolish, adoring,
priggish boy!

When he had come in this morning, bringing the note of invitation from
his step-mother, he had seemed excited and ill at ease. She had felt
vexed at his coming so early, as she was anxious to superintend the
jam-making herself. Enid Crofton had a very practical side to her
character, and she was the last person to risk the wasting of good sugar
and good fruit through the stupidity of an inexperienced cook.

While Jack was still there one of her new acquaintances had come in for a
moment, for she had already made herself well liked in the neighbourhood,
and after the visitor had gone, Jack, exclaiming angrily that they were
never left in peace together, had begged her to go for a walk with him
that afternoon. This she had consented to do, after discovering that
Godfrey Radmore had gone up to London for the day.

And then, during their walk, Jack had suddenly made her a pompous offer
of marriage!

No wonder she smiled mischievously to herself, when pacing slowly up and
down the path between a row of espaliered apple trees.

She told herself that in a sense it had been her fault. They were sitting
on a fallen tree trunk, in a lonely little wood, Jack, as he seldom was,
tongue-tied and dull. Piqued, she had twitted him on his silence. And
then, all at once, he had turned and, seizing her roughly, had kissed her
with the pent-up passion of a man in love who till now has never kissed a
woman.

Pacing slowly in her dark garden, Enid Crofton's pulse quickened at
the recollection of those maladroit, hungry kisses. Something--a mere
glancing streak of the great shaft of ecstasy which enveloped Jack
Tosswill's whole being had touched her senses into what had seemed to
him marvellous response.

When at last he had released her, and in words of at once triumphant and
humble adoration, had made her an offer of marriage, she had felt it an
absurd anti-climax to a very delicious and, even in her well-stored
memory, a unique experience.

And now she remembered the last time a man had kissed her. It was quite
a little while ago, on the day she had taken possession of The Trellis
House. Of course Captain Tremaine had tipped the guard so that they
should have a carriage to themselves. But she had been uncomfortably
aware that he was half-ashamed of himself--that he remembered, all the
time, that she was a newly-made widow.

Someh