"You're not going to have me with you, then Uncle?"
"No, Olwen fach. For the present, not," he told her above the rustling of the papers. "I shan't require you for the work in hand for the next——Let me see, four or six months, perhaps. You will be able to go home; have a nice rest from work; help your Auntie in the house, see a little bit of your sisters and of your old friends."
Olwen felt precisely as if the genial-voiced old man were condemning her to penal servitude for the rest of her natural life.
"Uncle!" she exclaimed in horror.
It was met by a mildly surprised glance from the old man.
"What's the matter, small lass? Aren't you glad to be seeing your home again?"
"No," blurted out Olwen. "I don't want to go. Oh, I don't. Uncle! I'd rather be with you. Much. But if you can't have me, I—I—I won't go back——"
She put up her little head, shaking it violently as if in the face of a vision of the home in which she'd been brought up. Comfortable, old-fashioned, rambling place that it was, set in wild beauty, and echoing with gay voices, it repelled her; it seemed to her a prison from which there would be no further escaping towards the Heart's Desire. At work as her Uncle's secretary, there still seemed chances of movement in her life, there still seemed possibilities.... But as a girl at home, she felt she would be chained and bound by a thousand chances against.
She told herself rebelliously, "Down there, I should never see him again! I won't go!"
Unconsciously her hands clasped themselves upon her breast, upon that slender talisman that she was wearing.