“I do hope you will reconsider, Patricia. I can’t help thinking what your mother would say.”

“My mother was rather keen on my eating three meals a day.”

“My dear! As though you couldn’t live here as long as you cared to. I really do think, Patricia, to be a sort of upper servant in that house—”

“You don’t know Mrs. Wainwright,” I said gaily, and kissing her lightly went upstairs to my room.

My other talk, with Lydia Morgan, was on the same order. I found her on the small brick terrace at the back of her house. Evidently Audrey was out as usual, for the table set for one was still there, and she was holding her after-dinner coffee cup and gazing at the river at the foot of her garden. She looked up and smiled.

“Hello, Pat,” she said. “Come and have some coffee. The river’s lovely tonight.”

“So are you, darling. Yes, I’ll have coffee. I don’t care if I stay awake all night.”

“What’s happened? You look excited.”

“So I am,” I said lightly.

But when I told her she looked thoughtful.

“I hope it’s all right,” she said. “I’d rather see you in business, of course.”

“I seem to have heard the word. What do you mean, business?”

She laughed a little.

“All right. You win. That place would give me the jitters, but you’re younger. I suppose you can laugh it off. What is she paying you?”

“I never asked her,” I said, suddenly remembering, and we both giggled like a pair of schoolgirls.

How old was Lydia then? Perhaps thirty-eight to my twenty-five, for I remember when she and Don Morgan moved there, into that house on the river next to our own. I was a youngster at the time, and I fell madly in love with her. She was gay and lovely, and I was furious with jealousy when, a year or so later, Audrey was born.

She was still lovely. She had inherited a modest income, and on it she managed to run her house, dress Audrey beautifully, and always look better herself than any other woman I know. She was slim, with a little gray in her sleek black hair, and with the most exquisite hands I ever saw. Useful hands too. She was never an idle woman.

We talked a little that night, of the Cloisters, of Audrey’s dress for the dance, and of what the social secretary should wear on such an occasion, Lydia being in favor of forgetting the job and looking my best. She had seen a full-skirted blue taffeta in town which she thought would suit me. But for long intervals we were silent, Lydia busy with her own thoughts, and I remembering, as I always did there, the days when my mother and father were living, and when I used to see Don—Don Juan to the village—riding out on Sunday mornings on his big horse. Smiling down at me and saying, “Hello, Pat. How’s the jumping?”