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the weeks that followed Tregan rode many times with Alice Johns. To say that he found happiness in their contact would not be true. The girl puzzled him. Her reactions to his moods and manners were disconcerting in their cool sanity and he found himself unable to talk to her at any length. This pricked his carefully protected vanity and made him irritable.
Beneath the surface of their acquaintance there still lay his new uneasiness, a restless eddy that drew contentment into its vortex and submerged it.
On his first visit to call on her Tregan stood in the dark-panelled library looking out over a veranda. Beyond the portico was the lawn, bordered with the kind of artificially bred conifers that one sees on such lawns. The green stretch reached out under half-nude elms to a high
