she was peering through iron bars into the playground of a school to
which she didn't belong. She was Joan-all-alone, she told herself,
and added, with that touch of picturesque phrasing inherited from
her well-read mother, that she was more like a racing motorboat tied
to a crumbling wharf in a deserted harbor than anything else in the
world.

There was a knock on her door and the sound of a bronchial cough.
"Come in," she said and darted an anxious look at the blond fat face
of the clock on the mantelshelf. She had forgotten all about the
time.

It was Gleave who opened the door, Gleave the bald-headed manservant
who had grown old along with his master with the same resentfulness-
-the ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer who had
thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when both
were in the full flush of middle age. His limp, the result of an
epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by
severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by
his shortness of breath.

He got no further than: "Your grandfather--"

"I know," said Joan. "I'm late again. And there'll be a row, I
suppose. Well, that will break the monotony, at any rate." Seizing
the moment when Gleave was wrestling with his cough, she slipped her
letter into her desk, rubbed her face vigorously with her
handkerchief and made a dart at the door. Grandfather Ludlow
demanded strict punctuality and made the house shake if it failed
him. What he would have said if he could have seen this eager,