and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting
impression than the stroke of a stick upon water. There was nothing
to take hold of in girls--nothing hard, permanent, satisfactory. Did
Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She tried to remember.

At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered
the room, came forward and shook Helen's hand with an emotional kind of
heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel's father, Helen's brother-in-law.
As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make a fat man of
him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face was a large
framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features and the glow
in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand assaults of the
weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to respond to them
in others.

"It is a great pleasure that you have come," he said, "for both of us."

Rachel murmured in obedience to her father's glance.

"We'll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it
an honour to have charge of him. Pepper'll have some one to contradict
him--which I daren't do. You find this child grown, don't you? A young
woman, eh?"

Still holding Helen's hand he drew his arm round Rachel's shoulder, thus
making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.

"You think she does us credit?" he asked.

"Oh yes," said Helen.