“He’s not the sort of man I want you to know,” he finished.  “That ought to be sufficient.  Have you seen him since?”

Lily flushed, but she did not like to lie.

“I had tea with him one afternoon.  I often have tea with men, father.  You know that.”

“You knew I wouldn’t approve, or you would have mentioned it.”

Because he felt that he had been rather ruthless with her, he stopped in at the jeweler’s the next morning and sent her a tiny jeweled watch.  Lily was touched and repentant.  She made up her mind not to see Louis Akers again, and found a certain relief in the decision.  She was conscious that he had a peculiar attraction for her, a purely emotional appeal.  He made her feel alive.  Even when she disapproved of him, she was conscious of him.  She put him resolutely out of her mind, to have him reappear in her dreams, not as a lover, but as some one dominant and insistent, commanding her to do absurd, inconsequential things.

Now and then she saw Willy Cameron, and they had gone back, apparently, to the old friendly relationship.  They walked together, and once they went to the moving pictures, to Grace’s horror.  But there were no peanuts to eat, and instead of the jingling camp piano there was an orchestra, and it was all strangely different.  Even Willy Cameron was different.  He was very silent, and on the way home he did not once speak of the plain people.

Louis Akers had both written and telephoned her, but she made excuses, and did not see him, and the last time he had hung up the receiver abruptly.  She felt an odd mixture of relief and regret.

Then, about the middle of April, she saw him again.

Spring was well on by that time.  Before the Doyle house on Cardew Way the two horse-chestnuts were showing great red-brown buds, ready to fall into leaf with the first warm day, and Elinor, assisted by Jennie, the elderly maid, was finishing her spring house-cleaning.  The Cardew mansion showed window-boxes at each window, filled by the florist with spring flowers, to be replaced later by summer ones.  A potted primrose sat behind the plate glass of the Eagle Pharmacy, among packets of flower seeds and spring tonics, its leaves occasionally nibbled by the pharmacy cat, out of some atavistic craving survived through long generations of city streets.

The children’s playground near the Lily furnace was ready; Howard Cardew himself had overseen the locations of the swings and chute-the-chutes.  And at Friendship an army of workers was sprinkling and tamping the turf of the polo field.  After two years of war, there was to be polo again that spring and early summer.  The Cherry Hill Hunt team was still intact, although some of the visiting outfits had been badly shot to pieces by the war.  But the war was over.  It lay behind, a nightmare to be forgotten as soon as possible.  It had left its train of misery and debt, but —­spring had come.