weep in his arms....

5

"Don't say we are separated," she whispered, putting her still wet face
close to his.

"No. We're mates," he answered softly, with his arm about her.

"How could we ever keep away from each uvver?" she whispered.

He was silent.

"How COULD we?"

He answered aloud. "Amanda," he said, "I mean to go round the world."

She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.

"What is to become of me," she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
"while you go round the world? If you desert me in London," she said,
"if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will
never forgive you, Cheetah! Never." Then in an almost breathless voice,
and as if she spoke to herself, "Never in all my days."

6

It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
nothing involuntary about Amanda. "Soon," she said, "we must begin to
think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
background. No woman is really content until she is a mother...." And
for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey
round the world.

But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little
embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the
light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than
himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need
be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir
Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of
Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and
of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that
made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it
seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust
herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men
of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy
that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time
that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour
now and then for being lonely and despondent. And