And now it was this conversation which came back to her as she moved restlessly about in her bed.  She wondered uneasily whether she had made a mistake.  Her capital was very small, and she was now living on her capital, but after all, perhaps it would have been wiser to have given Piper that L500.  She was quite determined not to mix up Piper with Godfrey Radmore, but she had a queer, uncomfortable feeling that she had not done with this man yet.

At last she fell into a heavy, troubled, worried sleep—­the kind of sleep from which a woman always wakes unrefreshed.

But daylight brought comfort to Enid Crofton, and after she had had her early cup of tea and had enjoyed her nice hot bath, she felt quite cheery again, and her strange, bad night faded into nothingness.  She was young, she was strong, above all she was enchantingly pretty!  She told herself confidently that nothing terrible, nothing really dreadful ever happens to a woman who is as attractive as she knew herself to be to the sex which still holds all the material power there is to hold in this strange world.

During the last three weeks, she had sometimes wondered uneasily whether Godfrey Radmore realised how very pretty she was.  There was something so curiously impersonal about him—­and yet last night he had very nearly kissed her!

She laughed aloud, gaily, triumphantly, as she went down to her late breakfast.

CHAPTER XII

At the moment that Enid Crofton was telling herself that everything was going fairly well with her, and that nothing could alter the fact that she was now, and likely to remain for a long time, a woman likely to attract every man with whom she came in contact—­Godfrey Radmore, following Janet Tosswill after breakfast into the drawing-room of Old Place, exclaimed deprecatingly:—­“I feel like Rip Van Winkle!’

“Do you?” She turned to him and smiled a little sadly.  “It’s you that have changed, Godfrey.  Everything here is much the same.  As for me, I never see any change from one year to another.”

“But they’ve all grown up!” he exclaimed plaintively.  “You can’t think how odd it seems to find a lot of grown-up young ladies and gentlemen instead of the jolly little kids who were in the nursery with Nanna nine years ago.  By the way, Nanna hasn’t changed, and”—­he hesitated, then brought out with an effort, “Mr. Tosswill is exactly the same.”

She felt vexed that he hadn’t included Betty.  To her step-mother’s fond eyes Betty was more attractive now than in her early girlhood.  “I think the children have improved very much,” she said quickly.  “Jack was a horrid little prig nine years ago!”