JEAN was immensely puzzled at the abrupt change which had occurred in Mrs. Craig’s manner immediately upon hearing that she was the daughter of Glyn Peterson, and, as soon as the visitor had taken her departure, she sought an explanation.

“What on earth made Mrs. Craig freeze up the instant my father’s name was mentioned? Did she hate him for any reason?”

Tormarin looked across at her.

“No,” he answered quietly. “She didn’t hate him. She loved him.”

Jean stared at him in frank astonishment. She had never dreamed that there had been any other woman than Jacqueline in Glyn’s life.

“Mrs. Craig—and my father?” she exclaimed incredulously.

“She wasn’t Mrs. Craig in those days. She was Judith Burke.”

“Well, but——” persisted Jean, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. “I still don’t see why.”

“Why what?”—unwillingly.

“Why she looked as if she loathed the very sight of me. That’s not”—drily—“quite the effect you would expect love to produce!”

There was a curiously abstracted look in Tormarin’s eyes as he made answer.

“Love is productive of very curious effects on occasion. More particularly when it is without hope of fulfilment,” he added in a lower tone.

“Well, I suppose my father couldn’t help not falling in love with Mrs. Craig,” protested Jean with some warmth. “Nor could he have prevented her caring for him. And it’s certainly illogical of her to feel any resentment towards me on that score. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Love and logic have precious little to say to each other, as a rule,” replied Tormarin grimly. “To Judith, you’re the child of the woman who stole her lover away from her, so you can hardly expect her to feel an overwhelming affection for you.”

“The woman who stole her lover away from her?” repeated Jean slowly. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, Blaise?”

He glanced at her in some surprise.

“Surely—— Don’t you know the circumstances?”

She shook her head.

“No. I simply don’t know in the least what you are talking about. Please tell me.”

Tormarin made no response for a moment. He was standing with his back to the light, but as he lit a cigarette the flare of the match revealed a worried expression on his face, as though he deprecated the turn the conversation was taking.

“Oh, well,” he said at last, evading the point at issue, “it’s all ancient history now. Let it go. There’s never anything gained by digging up the dry bones of the past.” Jean’s mouth set itself in a mutinous line of determination. “Please tell me, Blaise,” she reiterated. “As it is something which concerns my father and a woman I shall probably be meeting fairly often in the future, I think I have a right to know about it.”

He shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

“Very well—if you insist. But I don’t think you’ll be any happier for knowing.” He paused. “Still inflexible?” She bent her head.

“Quite”—firmly—“whatever it is, I’d rather know it.”

“On your own head be it, then.” He seemed trying to infuse a lighter element into the conversation, as though hoping to minimise the effect of what he had to tell her. “It was just this—that your father and Judith Burke were engaged to be married at the time he met your mother, and that—well, to make a long story short, he ran away with Miss Mavory on the day fixed for his wedding with Judith.”

A dead silence followed the disclosure. Then Jean uttered a low cry of dismay.

“My father did that? Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

Tormarin could see that the story had distressed her. Her eyes showed hurt and bewildered like those of a child who has met with a totally unexpected rebuff.

“Don’t take it like that!” he urged hastily. “After all, It was nothing so terrible. You look as though he had broken every one of the ten commandments”—smiling.

Jean smiled back rather wanly.

“I don’t know that I should worry very much if he had—in some circumstances. But—don’t you see?—it was so cruel, so horribly selfish!”

“You’ve got to remember two things in justification——”

“Justification?”—expressively. “There wasn’t any. There couldn’t be.”

“Well, excuse, then, if you like. One thing is that Jacqueline Mavory was one of the most beautiful of women, and the other, that your father’s engagement to Judith had really been more or less engineered by their respective parents—adjoining properties, friends of long standing, and so on. It was no love-match—on his side.”

“But on her wedding-day!”—pitifully. “Oh! Poor Judith!”

Tormarin smiled a trifle cynically.

“That was the root of the trouble. It was Judith’s pride that was hurt—as well as her heart. She married Major Craig not long after, and I believe they were really fond of one another and comparatively happy. But she has never forgiven Peterson from that day to this. And you, being Jacqueline Mavory’s daughter, will come in for the residue of her bitterness. Unless”—ironically—“you can make friends with her.”

“I shall try to,” said Jean simply. “Is Major Craig living now?”

“No. He died out in India, and after his death Judith came back to England. She has lived at Willow Ferry with her brother, Geoffrey Burke, ever since.”

There was a long silence, while Jean tried to fit in the new facts she had learned with her knowledge of her father’s character. She was a little afraid that Tormarin might misunderstand her impulsive outburst of indignation.

“Don’t think that I am sitting in judgment on my father,” she said at last. “In a way, I can—even understand his doing such a thing. You know, for the last two years of my mother’s life I was with them both constantly, and anyone living with them could understand their doing all kinds of things that ordinary people wouldn’t do.” She paused, as though seeking words that might make her meaning clearer. “They would never really mean to hurt anyone, but they were just like a couple of children together—gloriously irresponsible and happy. I always felt years older than either of them. Glyn used to say I was ‘cursed with a damnable sense of duty’”—laughing rather ruefully. “I suppose I am. Probably I inherit it from our old Puritan ancestors on the Peterson side. I know I couldn’t have cheerfully run off and taken my happiness at the cost of someone else’s prior right.”

A look of extreme bitterness crossed Tormarin’s face.

“Wait till you’re tempted,” he said shortly. “Wait till what you want wars against what you ought to have—what you’ve the right to take.”

For a moment she made no answer. Put bluntly like that, the matter suddenly presented itself to her as one of the poignant possibilities of life. Supposing—supposing such a choice should ever be demanded of her? She felt a vague fear catch at her heart, an indefinable dread.

When at last she spoke, the eyes she lifted to meet Tor-marin’s were troubled. In them he could read the innate honesty which was prepared to face the question he had raised, and behind that—courage. A young, untried courage, not sure of itself, it is true, but still courage that only waited till some call should wake it into fighting actuality.

“I hope,” she said with a wistful humility that was rather touching, “I h............