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recalling these incidents‚ was conscious that her resentment at them was something new; was something different from the weary habitual patience into which the buffets of life had beaten her.
    But this sort of thing had been going on for a year; and she still could be quite happy at certain moments.
    Not one single time, since Rook had brought her to the house, had Mrs. Ashover spoken to her, or smiled at her, or eaten at the same table with her.
    The servants‚ too, old-fashioned and eccentric, had taken their cue from the old lady and had missed no opportunity of making the intruder feel her position.
    Well! that , at any rate, was quite different now. The appearance of Cousin Ann upon the scene had changed all that. Netta did not quite understand Cousin Ann’s kindness . But, on the other hand, she did not suspect it of any hidden treachery. She just accepted it as she had accepted so much else. And it certainly had made the whole difference as far as the servants were concerned. Lady Ann could not apparently coax Mrs. Ashover into a different mood; but she had forced her to retreat from position after position of overt contempt, and she had cast such a spell over the rest of the household that the girl no longer went to and fro among them like a convicted criminal.
    Everybody in the place had felt the new influence. The worst of the village gossips, when they saw the daughter of Lord Poynings grow friendlier and friendlier with “the kept woman,” had begun to wonder if it wouldn’t after all result in Master Rook’s marrying “the poor harmless body.”
    Even that formidable entity “the neighbourhood” showed signs of a certain restlessness under its own verdict. It was one thing to punish the impoverished Ashovers. It was another thing to be denied the pleasure of meeting Ann Wentworth Gore.
    A tentative gesture, however, which was made from a certain quarter to propitiate Lady Ann without relaxing the proprieties, met with such an annihilating rebuff that it would have needed a bolder person than any who lived just then on the banks of the Frome to repeat that offence. The Ashover family was therefore left in peace to work out its own destiny.
    Many other images besides those of the ungracious old lady and the friendly young one rose between Netta and the streaming window panes that November morning.
    Rain more than anything else in the world carries the mind back to early associations, and Netta saw herself as a little girl in a starched pinafore watching it beat on the roof of the Black Dog at Portsmouth.
    She saw herself as an overworked barmaid at the King George in Southampton, watching it turn the little stone gutter into a turbid flood.
    She saw herself as the ambiguously protected “niece” of Major-General Sir James Carton watching it drip‚ drip, drip from a Hammersmith waterspout upon a galvanized-iron roof.
    She saw herself as a second-rate actress in a second-rate stock company watching it from the common dressing room as it changed the colour from yellow ochre to rusty brown of a Bristol alley wall.
    She saw herself in a boat at Abingdon, watching it leap up in a million tiny water tongues from the surface of the great smooth river, the day when a Guy’s Hospital student took her to Pangbourne. She could feel at that very moment the touch of his young feverish hand upon her body. She could hear the harsh-throated sedge warblers chattering in the reeds.
    Netta loved these solitary interludes in the Ashover dining room.
    She could dream things there and tell herself stories there, untroubled by any agitation. She could even think without hopeless regret of that rash proceeding that had for ever ruined her chance of having a child. She could even try to imagine what sort of child Rook and she would have had if things had been different!
    So far off and so soothingly vague were Netta’s thoughts that morning that she scarcely turned in her chair when Pandie, the red-haired housemaid, came in