s daunted by an apparent want of
response which she rightly attributed to its proper cause, a strong
friendship had grown up between them, which had continued, in spite of
meetings few and far between, until the present day.

Marion had married, very soon after leaving school, a man who, while
invalided home from South Africa, had excited her first to pity and
then to love. She mothered her big soldier regardless of his stalwart
size and now perfect physique much in the same way in which she had
mothered Philippa in her childhood, and her loving heart was still
further satisfied by the possession of a son, now eight years old.

Bill Heathcote had retired from the army, and was living on a property
to which he had succeeded on the death of his grandmother some three
years ago.

Lady Lawson's last words returned to Philippa's memory: "Good-bye, my
darling child. I do hope you will have a good time!"

She smiled at the recollection. A good time! It was an expression
which had been very frequently on her mother's lips, as it is on the
lips of so many people now-a-days. It may mean so many things. To
Lady Lawson it meant a succession of social gaieties. Well, she
thought with thankfulness, these were hardly to be expected at Bessacre.

Marion had expressly stated that Philippa must not look forward to
anything of the kind. Their only excitements at this season of the
year were a few garden parties which could hardly be called amusing,
but that she might have plenty of golf if she cared for the game.
Also, if time hung too heavily, they might indulge in the frantic
dissipation of motoring over to Renwick and listening to the band on
the pier.

Renwick, which had been a quiet fishing village a few years ago, was
now metamorphosed with surprising rapidity, by the enterprise of its
newly formed Parish Council, into a fashionable watering-place, with
pier, concert-hall, esplanade and palatial hotels all complete, for the
pleasure and comfort of the summer visitors, and also incidentally for
the personal profit of the members of the aforesaid Council: a state of
things much regretted by the residents in the neighbourhood, whose
peace was disturbed during the holiday season by char-a-bancs and
picnic parties. So much Marion Heathcote had explained in her last
letter.

Philippa sat enthralled by the beauty of the country through which she
passed. The wide-spreading cornfields, the cosy flint farm-houses,
with thei