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Trent Stoke from the beginning, you know very well that your grandfather—all right, our grandfather—would have settled a lot on you. Goodness knows how much; I’m not used to thinking in thousands. And here you are trying to refuse everything. For pity’s sake be reasonable.”

She did not speak. It was getting dark in the drawing-room now, and the others might come in at any moment and snap on the disconcerting electric light; but Tony and Pamela had forgotten that possibility.

“Is it because you dislike me that you’re—doing this?”

She half turned to him, but it was too dark to see her face.

“Somehow I—don’t dislike you now,” she said very low. “It all seems different, but I can’t. Don't ask me to do that.”

“Please let’s be friends, Pamela,” said Tony. “After all, we—we are cousins, you know.”

They smiled, absentmindedly, and Pamela stood up. “Yes,” she said, “but let me—I mean I’ll go now. I don’t want to come to dinner.”

“If one of us is going to cut dinner it ought to be me.”

“But I don’t want dinner, and I couldn’t sit there and—see them all. Please tell Mrs. Straine I have a headache. I truly have.”

She fled, only just in time, the others all arrived a few minutes later, and Tony made her apologies as they filed into the dining-room. He had not quite recovered his usual poise, and only just stopped himself on the verge of saying, “Pamela came down to say she had a headache.”

“Miss Learmonth” had an unconvincing, dead sound, he wondered no one noticed it; but Alison merely received the information with a murmur of sympathy, and Miss Sidmouth met it with the remark that poor Miss Learmonth had had headaches twice before, she was not as