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Her coffee unfinished, she rose and walked about the room. She had forgotten Wildherne as though he had never existed. What was Rosalind about? Why had she not told Janet her preoccupation? Why must she always be so secret? Did Janet ever lecture or scold her? Did she not always understand, and if she gave advice was she not always tender and kind?

No, not always. When you felt such love and watched the loved one pursuing something or someone unworthy, how could you quiet that agitation and fear? She had not always quieted it, and Rosalind feared those moods when Janet's eyes were sad and reproachful and her silences minatory.

The little bell rang. Janet went to the door, and there was her dearest best friend, Rachel Seddon.

Rachel came in, and the two women held each other in a long loving embrace; then Rachel kept Janet at arm's length.

"Let me look at you and see whether you're changed. Not a bit. But you will be. Oh, you darling, I am so glad." Rachel Seddon was a woman of fifty, old enough to be Janet's mother. Therein had lain some of the charm of their relationship; Rachel was mother, sister, and friend to one who deeply needed such affection. And yet Rachel was strange. As she stood there in her dark furs, even in this moment of emotion, she seemed remote, apart. It was perhaps the Russian blood in her, something sad and brooding behind her vitality and fun. Her life, she said, was over. Her husband, after a difficult early married life, she had come deeply to love (he crippled by a riding accident and so drawing out of her that maternity that was by far the most passionate element of her nature); after his death she had rebuilt her life around her son, but there too there was a remoteness and a final reserve. Tom was all English, all his father; some of his mother's nature was so foreign to him that she could not share it with him. She could not share it with any one, and in the very moment of intimate affection with Tom, Janet, Uncle John Beaminster, she would withdraw herself and they would fumble blindly for someone who was not there.