her with his shoulders bent and a piece of bread on the back of his
dinner jacket. The two dogs followed, and I made up the tail of that
queer procession. I hate that stiff, cheerless drawing room anyhow,
with all its shiny cases of china and a collection of all the
uncomfortable chairs ever designed since Adam. I wanted to laugh and
cry, and when I saw myself in the glass, I couldn't believe that I
wasn't a little shivering girl with a ribbon in my hair and white
socks."

Some one whistled outside. The girl seized the boy's arm in a sudden
panic of fright.

"It's all right," he said." It's only the gardener going to his
cottage."

Joan laughed, and her grip relaxed. "I'm jumpy," she said. "My
nerves are all over the place. Do you wonder?"

"No, tell me the rest."

Joan's voice took on a little deeper note like that of a child who
has come to the really creepy bit of his story. "Marty," she went
on, "I wish you could have heard the way in which Grandmother let
herself go! She held me by the scruff of my neck and hit me right
and left with the sort of sarcasm that made me crinkle. According to
her, I was on the downward path. I had done something quite hopeless
and unforgivable. She didn't know how she could bring herself to
report the affair--think of calling it an affair, Marty!--to my poor
mother. Mother, who'd never say a word to me, whatever I did! She
might have out-of-date views, she said, of how young girls should