Her smile grew wider - even more sorrowful.

"How fluently you talk, don't you?"

"Give it up, Judith - give it all up."

"No!"

"He's not worth it, my dear."

She said very quietly and slowly:

"He's worth everything in the world to me."

"No, no. Judith, I beg of you - "

The smile vanished. She turned on me like an avenging fury.

"How dare you? How dare you interfere? I won't stand it. You are never to speak to me of this again. I hate you - I hate you. It's no business of yours. It's my life - my own secret inside life!"

She got up. With one firm hand she pushed me aside and went past me. Like an avenging fury. I stared after her - dismayed.

II

I was still there, dazed and helpless, unable to think out my next course of action, some quarter of an hour later.

I was there when Elizabeth Cole and Norton found me.

They were, I realized later, very kind to me. They saw, they must have seen, that I was in a state of great mental perturbation. But tactfully enough they made no slightest allusion to my state of mind. Instead they took me with them on a rambling walk. They were both nature lovers. Elizabeth Cole pointed out wild flowers to me, Norton showed me birds through his field glasses. Their talk was gentle, soothing, concerned only with feathered beings and with woodland flora. Little by little I came back to normal although underneath I was still in a state of the utmost perturbation.

Moreover I was, as people are, convinced that any happening that occurred was connected with my own particular perplexity.

So, therefore, when Norton, his glasses to his eyes, exclaimed: "Hullo, if that isn't a speckled woodpecker. I never - " and then broke off suddenly, I immediately leapt to suspicion. I held out my hand for the glasses.

"Let me see."

My voice was peremptory.

Norton fumbled with the glasses. He said in a curious, hesitating voice:

"I - I - made a mistake - it's flown away - at least, as a matter of fact, it was quite a common bird."

His face was white and troubled. He avoided looking at us. He seemed both bewildered and distressed.

Even now I cannot think I was altogether unreasonable in jumping to the conclusion that he had seen through those glasses of his something that he was determined to prevent my seeing.

Whatever it was that he had seen, he was so thoroughly taken aback by it that it was noticeable to both of us.

His glasses had been trained on a distant belt of wood-land. What had he seen there?

I said peremptorily:

"Let me look."

I snatched at the glasses. I remember he tried to defend them from me, but he did it clumsily. I seized them roughly.

Norton said weakly:

It wasn't really - I mean, the bird's gone ... I wish - " My hands shaking a little, I adjusted the glasses to my eyes. They were powerful glasses. I trained them as nearly as I could on the spot where I thought Norton had been looking.