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she slept, listening in her sleep to the joyous murmur. She could rest safely, for Hester was there beside her and would watch over her.

‘Hester,’ she said suddenly, still with closed eyes,—‘Hester, what did you mean by saying that Clive might hate you? You must know that it was because of you that he hated me; after what I’d believed of you.’

‘Don’t you believe it any longer?’ Hester enquired after a moment. She had got out her cigarettes and was smoking; looking up at her, Monica saw her through a waft of smoke.

‘No; I believe it no longer.’

‘Because Clive told you I’d been straight with him in the past?’

‘Not only that. That didn’t touch the present, did it? No; it all dropped away.—Because of what I felt of you and of Captain Ingpen. I saw, when I woke this morning, that it could not be true, of either of you.’

Hester smoked, her eyes on the sunlit fields. She wore her straight blue linen dress, with the narrow black belt around her hips; rather like a French child’s apron. She was bareheaded and looked like a child. ‘All the same,’ she said presently, ‘I see why you believed it. You don’t know anything