don?' he asked again.

She shook her head.

'I want to be alone. Forgive me if I make you go so abruptly.'

'My dear girl, it's very good of you to make sure that I don't miss my
train,' he smiled drily.

'Good-bye and thank you.'

II

While Lucy wandered by the seashore, occupied with painful memories, her
old friend Dick, too lazy to walk with her, sat in the drawing-room of
Court Leys, talking to his hostess.

Mrs. Crowley was an American woman, who had married an Englishman, and
on being left a widow, had continued to live in England. She was a
person who thoroughly enjoyed life; and indeed there was every reason
that she should do so, since she was young, pretty, and rich; she had a
quick mind and an alert tongue. She was of diminutive size, so small
that Dick Lomas, by no means a tall man, felt quite large by the side of
her. Her figure was exquisite, and she had the smallest hands in the
world. Her features were so good, regular and well-formed, her
complexion so perfect, her agile grace so enchanting, that she did not
seem a real person at all. She was too delicate for the hurly-burly of
life, and it seemed improbable that she could be made of the ordinary
clay from which human beings are manufactured. She had the artificial
grace of those dainty, exquisite ladies in the _Embarquement pour
Cithere_ of the charming Watteau; and you felt that she was fit to
saunter on that sunny strand, habited in satin of delicate colours, with
a witty, decadent cavalier by her side. It was preposterous to talk to
her of serious things, and nothing but an airy badinage seemed possible
in her company.

Mrs. Crowley had asked Lucy and Dick Lomas to stay with her in the
house she had just taken for a term of years. She had spent a week by
herself to arrange things to her liking, and insisted that Dick should
admire all she had done. After a walk round the park he vowed that he
was exhausted and must rest till tea-time.

'Now tell me what made you take it. It's so far from anywhere.'

'I met the owner in Rome last winter. It belongs to a Mrs. Craddock, and
when I told her I was looking out for a house, she suggested that I
should come and see this.'

'Why doesn't she live in it herself?'

'Oh, I don't know. It appears that she was passionately devoted to her
husband, and he broke his neck in the hunting-field, so she couldn't
bear to live here any more.'

Mrs. Crowley looked round the drawing-room with satisf