The letter she wrote crossed Mollie Esdaile's Sunday morning one. It was written on Saturday, and missed the Santon Sunday morning delivery by a post, arriving there on Monday.

"Please don't think me ungrateful," Mollie read, "but all sorts of things seem to be happening, and I'm so afraid of hurting you after all your kindness. Perhaps I'd better come to the point straight away and explain afterwards. I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty and myself after all."

Mollie was standing in the porch of the cottage as she read this. It was immediately after breakfast. The postman could be seen in the middle distance, climbing the stile on his way to Newsome's. Joan was upstairs, getting the children ready for the shore.

Mollie thrust the letter into her breast. If Joan knew that the postman had been she would come flying downstairs, and in any case Mollie did not wish to be seen reading a letter. This from Audrey Cunningham was all there was for her. For Joan there was nothing at all.

Quietly she slipped into the cottage, picked up a floppy print sunbonnet, and slipped noiselessly out again. The back of the cottage had no windows. Like a malefactor she skirted the palings of the little front garden and gained the security of the back. But even this was not far enough. The path up the field led to the Coast-guard Station, and, with one furtive glance behind her, she took it. She would finish Audrey's letter there.

Mollie Esdaile is still a young woman, but she looked every minute of her age that morning. She had not slept. The room adjoining hers was Joan's, and the wall between them might just as well not have existed, so little a barrier had it been to the restless mental ticking of the girl on the other side of it. A soft and tortured toss, then the creaking of the bed, then the sounds of Joan moving about her room; the striking of a match, a long silence, and then the creaking of the bed again—all night it had gone on. Mollie had not gone to her; what had there been to do or say? A hundred times she had promised, as if it had lain in her power, that there should be a letter in the morning. None had come. She felt a coward. She simply could not face Joan.

There was a merry morning wind, that ruffled the fleeces on the sheep's backs and set the halliards of the Coast-guard's mast cracking and rattling. Mollie tied the strings of the print sunbonnet under her plump chin and walked with her head a little averted in order to see round the print blinker. Beyond the waving grass-heads the sea appeared, a wide silver glitter. You cannot see the shore from that hill. The sands and the mile-long rollers lie far below that cliff's edge over which the men are let down by ropes to gather the eggs from the awful ledges.

Then, in the little sunken way that runs down to the Rocket-house, she sat down and took out the letter again.

"I don't think I can accept your offer of Lennox Street for Monty and myself after all. Our engagement is not definitely broken off, but I can't stand things as they are, and am back in Oakley Street again. They say I can stay on, but I may have to pay a little more. Monty is still at the studio."

"I knew it!" broke from Mollie with soft conviction. "I knew that if Philip stayed that wedding would be put off! I told him so——"

Frowning, she turned to the letter again.

"I'm trying to think it all over quite calmly," the letter went on. "Perhaps it isn't Monty after all. Perhaps it is just that men worry me. I don't know really whether I'm a man's sort of woman. Their ways seem so queer and roundabout to me. Lots of them don't seem fair. I don't want to marry and make a mess of it a second time, and I don't think Monty sees this as I do. Of course, I don't want him to tell me every little thing he does and everywhere he goes or anything of that kind, but I hate being kept in the dark as I know I am being. It all seemed to start with that horrible accident. Nothing's been the same since. Of course, they've told me about Mr. Smith and poor darling Joan, but if it was only that I could understand it. I know there's something else. I'm afraid I'd rather a breakdown yesterday, when all three of us were in your cellar putting that wardrobe of mine away. There's something uncanny about that place. Monty thinks so too, but says he doesn't know what it is any more than I do. But there is something he does know and won't tell. And now it's all over Chelsea that something not quite right has happened. Mrs. Cook hinted at it this morning when she brought my milk up, and she said the milkman had told her. I really think that if the milkman knows I might be told. The fact is that just at present I don't feel much like men and marriage. You'll understand this, because I've told you heaps of things I should never dream of telling Monty——"

Mollie's gaze wandered to the twinkling silver sea. She remembered some of those things that would never be told to Monty. It was perhaps not altogether fair to Monty that he should have to restore the whole of the credit of his sex that the late George Cunningham had so let down, but she knew how Audrey felt about it. Men were trials sometimes. "Queer and roundabout?" Mollie not seldom called them infants outright. Such little things pleased them, such even less things caused them to dig their hoofs into the ground and refuse to budge. Whatever Philip's tremendous reason for remaining in Chelsea might be, Mollie brushed it aside as a trifle compared with Audrey's marriage. For a moment she almost forgot Joan's distress. Philip, with his curaÇao and candle-sticks, postpone Audrey's wedding? It was nonsense—not to be thought of. Mollie wouldn't hear of it. All this mystification should be put a stop to if she had to do it herself. Audrey, to be sure, was a highly-strung creature; lying there among the warm grasses and with the wind ruffling the silver sea, Mollie could afford not to take too seriously Audrey's broken sentences about uncanny cellars and whispered hints that ran all over Chelsea; but it seemed to her that there were two birds to be killed with one stone. If she were to go up to town she would be able to ascertain for herself what this Audrey-Monty trouble was all about, and also why newspapers were to be kept from Joan and how it was that Joan had first heard of Chummy's crash from Chummy himself.

She looked at her wrist-watch and scrambled to her feet. She could not go without letting Joan know she was going, and Joan would already have started with the children for the shore. There was a train at midday. She would have plenty of time to intercept Joan, to tell her she was going to leave her for a couple of days, to return to the cottage, change and pack her bag.

And she did not think it necessary to warn Philip of her intention either.