Excellent eleven o'clock train from Waterloo .-- Enid." As she settled herself by the fire she told herself that a visit from Miss Crofton might be quite a good thing--so far as Beechfield was concerned.

Her associations with her husband's sister were wholly pleasant.

For one thing, Alice Crofton was well off, and Enid instinctively respected, and felt interested in, any possessor of money.
What a pity it was that Colonel Crofton had not had a fairy godmother! His only sister had been left L3,000 a year by a godmother, and she lived the agreeable life so many Englishwomen of her type and class live on the Continent.

While her real home was in Florence, she often travelled, and during the War she had settled down in Paris, giving many hours of each day to one of the British hospitals there.
The young widow's mind flew back to her one meeting with Alice Crofton.
It was during her brief engagement to Colonel Crofton, and the latter's sister, without being over cordial, had been quite pleasant to the startlingly pretty little woman, who had made such a fool of her brother.
But at the time of Colonel Crofton's death, his sister had been truly kind.

She had telegraphed L200 to her sister-in-law from Italy, and this sum of ready money had been very useful during that tragic week--and even afterwards, for the insurance people had made a certain amount of fuss after Colonel Crofton's sad suicide, "while of unsound mind," and this had caused a disagreeable delay.
The new tenant of The Trellis House had her lonely dinner brought in to her on a tray, and then, perhaps rather too soon--for she was not much of a reader, and there was nothing to while away the time--she went upstairs to her pleasant, cosy bedroom, and so to bed.
But, try as she might, she found it impossible to fall asleep; for what seemed to her hours she lay wide awake, tossing this way and that.