“I don’t see that I’m being Elizabeth-Anne-ish at all. Lady Ribblemere’s an awful bore, but she’s been very nice to me, and I don’t want to seem churlish. Besides, what’ll they think of me?”

“Most of ’em will wish they’d been courageous enough to stand out too.”

“Do you suppose they will?” Elizabeth said dubiously. She looked out into the garden, and the sight of the daffodils nodding beneath the window seemed to make her more indignant. “The idea of wanting me to go to meetings in a stuffy hall when the flowers are all coming up, and my speckled hen’s eggs nearly due to hatch out!”

“Disgraceful!” Stephen agreed, controlling his quivering lip.

“I shan’t join.”

“No, don’t.”

Elizabeth’s pet lamb appeared on the lawn.

“The angel! I don’t care what they think! They haven’t got a lamb to look after. Oh, it’s eating the hyacinth buds!” She ran out to coax the lamb away from the flower-beds. To Lady Ribblemere, who called to ask her for the last time to join the committee, she extended a polite but firm refusal. She surprised Lady Ribblemere, but she surprised herself more.

She thought how delighted Mr. Hengist would be if he could hear. Elizabeth-Anne was dying, slowly but surely.

She had made new friends in the neighbourhood, young wives like herself, and Mr. Trelawney. To him she went for advice about her garden. He gave it willingly, and tried hard to make her familiar with botanical terms. Mindful of her first error with him she smiled prettily, and said,

“It’s no good, Mr. Trelawney. When you say, I should put some Bachelor’s Buttons on the south bed, I know where I am, but when you say Ranunculus something-or-other, I’m absolutely at sea.”

“It is astonishing how ignorant people are of the most ordinary terms,” he said severely.

But he was a great help in the garden, because he knew when you had to plant out your boxes of seeds, and where would be the best place to grow sweet-peas, and that if you moved the peonies they wouldn’t flower till a year afterwards.

What with the garden and the lamb and the broods of fluffy chickens, Elizabeth’s time was fully and happily occupied. So that when Stephen went to London on business she elected to remain at the Halt.