pleading confidence. Then, with one swift movement, she was suddenly
kneeling and tearing to pieces two or three primroses in succession.

"Some people have to say things that can never be really said, or else
keep everything shut up."

"Don't you think they may make a mistake, and that the things can be
said--" He hesitated; he did not want to press her unfairly into
confidence; "to the right person?" he concluded rather lamely.

"Who is to find the right person?" said Molly bitterly; "the right
person is easy to find for people who have just ordinary cares and
difficulties, but the people who are in real difficulties don't easily
find the right person. I doubt if he or she exists myself!"

She turned to find Edmund Grosse looking at her with far too much
meaning in his face; there was a degree and intensity of interest in his
look that might be read in more than one way.

Molly blushed with the simplicity suited to seventeen rather than to
twenty-one. She was very near to the first outpouring in her life, the
torrent of her pent-up thoughts and feelings was pressing against the
flood-gates. It seemed to her that she had never known true and real
sympathy before she felt that look. She held out her hands towards him
with a little unconscious gesture of appeal.

"I have had a strange life," she said; "I am in very strange
circumstances now."

But Edmund suddenly got up, and before she could speak again a slight