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And while he walked by May’s side past the bowling-greens at the summit of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and its appurtenances, he wondered, he honestly wondered, that he could ever have hesitated between May Lawton and the other. Her superiority was too obvious; she was a woman of the world! She…. In a flash he knew that he would propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested a stroll towards Moorthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was conscious of a tumultuous uplifting and splendid carelessness of spirits. ‘Imagine me bringing it to a climax to-day,’ he reflected, profoundly pleased with himself. ‘Ah well, it will be settled once for all!’ He admired his own decision; he was quite struck by it. ‘I shall call her May before I leave her,’ he thought, gazing at her, and discovering how well the name suited her, with its significances of alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coyness.

‘So school is closed,’ he said, and added humorously: ‘”Broken up” is the technical term, I believe.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘and I had walked out into the park to meditate seriously upon the question of my holiday.’

She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and romance was in the air. They had crossed a couple of smoke-soiled fields, and struck into the old Hanbridge road just below the abandoned toll-house with its broad eaves.

‘And whither do your meditations point?’ he demanded playfully.

‘My meditations point to Switzerland,’ she said. ‘I have friends in Lausanne.’

The reference to foreign climes impressed him.

‘Would that I could go to Switzerland too!’ he exclaimed; and privately: ‘Now for it! I’m about to begin.’

‘Why?’ she questioned, with elaborate simplicity.

At the moment, as they were passing the toll-house, the other girl appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the toll-house, where the lane from Toft End joins the highroad. This second creature was smaller than Miss Lawton, less assertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much more beautiful.

Everyone halted and everyone blushed.

‘May!’ the interrupter at length stammered.

‘May!’ responded Miss Lawton lamely.

The other girl was named May too–May Deane, child of the well-known majolica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughter in a solitary and ancient house at Toft End.

Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands–his famous way with women seemed to have deserted him–and then he actually stated that he had forgotten an appointment, and must depart. He had gone before the girls could move.

When they were alone, the two Mays fronted each other, confused, hostile, almost homicidal.

‘I hope I didn’t spoil a tete-a-tete,’ said May Deane, stiffly and sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature.

The schoolmistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie.

‘No,’ she answered; ‘but if you had come three minutes earlier—-‘

She smiled calmly.

‘Oh!’ murmured May Deane, after a pause.

III

That evening May Deane returned home at half-past nine. She had been with her two brothers to a lawn-tennis party at Hillport, and she told her father, who was reading the Staffordshire Signal in his accustomed solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower good-night, and said that she should go to bed at once. But before retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss certain household matters: Jim’s early breakfast, the proper method of washing Herbert’s new flannels (Herbert would be very angry if they were shrunk), and the dog-biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled, she went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down near the window.

She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming nunlike mystery which often comes to a woman who lives alone and unguessed-at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one, save the servants and herself, ever entered it. Mr. Deane and Jim and Bertie might glance carelessly through the open door in passing along the corridor, but had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have exclaimed with momentary interest, ‘So this is May’s room!’ And some hint that May was more than a daughter and sister–a woman, withdrawn, secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the household life–might have penetrated their obtuse paternal and fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face (the nose and mouth were perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down), her dark hair, her quiet voice and her gentle acquiescence (diversified by occasional outbursts of sarcasm), appealed to them and won them; but they accepted her as something of course, as something which went without saying. They adored her, and did not know that they adored her.