“Yes, I suppose she does,” answered Nan, with some embarrassment.  She felt no particular desire to hear a resume of Miss Carson’s past life.  There was something in the girl which repelled her.

As though she sensed the other’s distaste to the trend the conversation had taken, Miss Carson switched briskly off to something else, and by the time Lady Gertrude returned with Roger, suggesting that they should go in to lunch, Nan had forgotten that odd feeling of repulsion which Isobel had first aroused in her, and had come to regard her as “quite a nice little thing who had had rather a rotten time.”

This was the impression Lady Gertrude’s niece contrived to make on most people.  It suited her very well and secured her many gifts and pleasures which would not otherwise have come her way.  She had accepted her aunt’s invitation to stay at Trenby Hall rather guardedly in the first instance, but when, as the visit drew towards its end, Lady Gertrude had proposed that she should make her home there altogether, she had jumped at the offer.

She speedily discovered that she and Trenby had many tastes in common, and with the sharp instinct of a woman who has tried hard to achieve a successful marriage and failed, there appeared to her no reason why in this instance “something should not come of it”—­to use the time-honoured phrase which so delicately conveys so much.  And but for the fact that Nan Davenant was staying at Mallow, something might have come of it!  Since community of tastes is responsible for many a happy and contented marriage.

Throughout the time she had lived at Trenby Hall, Isobel had contrived to make herself almost indispensable to Roger.  If a “damned button” flew off his coat, she was always at hand with needle and thread, and a quaint carved ivory thimble crowning one small finger, to sew it on again.  Or should his dress tie decline to adorn his collar in precisely the proper manner, those nimble, claw-like little fingers could always produce a well-tied bow in next to no time.  It was Isobel who found all the things which, manlike, he so constantly mislaid, who tramped over the fields with him, interesting herself in all the outdoor side of his life, and she was almost as good at landing a trout as he himself.

There seemed small likelihood of Roger’s going far afield in search of a wife, so that Isobel had not apprehended much danger to her hopes—­more especially as she had a shrewd idea that Lady Gertrude would look upon the marriage with the selfish approval of a woman who gains a daughter without losing the services of a niece who is “used to her ways.”

Such a union need not even upset existing arrangements.  Isobel had learned by long experience how to “get on” amicably with her autocratic relative, and the latter could remain—­as her niece knew very well she would wish to remain at Trenby Hall, still nominally its chatelaine.

Lady Gertrude and Isobel had never been frequent visitors at Mallow, and it had so happened that neither they, nor Roger on the rare occasions when he was home on leave from the Front, had chanced to meet Nan Davenant during her former visits to Mallow Court.