wler hat and a ready-made suit of grey,
was listening to their conversation from an adjacent table.

This man had entered the pavilion oddly. He had seemed to dodge in and
hesitate. Then he had chosen his table rather deliberately--and he kept
looking, and trying not to seem to look.

That was not all. Mr. Brumley's expression was overcast by the effort to
recall something. He sat elbows on table and leant forward towards Lady
Harman and at the blossom-laden trees outside the pavilion and trifled
with two fingers on his lips and spoke between them in a voice that was
speculative and confidential and muffled and mysterious. "Where have I
seen our friend to the left before?"

She had been aware of his distraction for some time.

She glanced at the man and found nothing remarkable in him. She tried to
go on with her explanations.

Mr. Brumley appeared attentive and then he said again: "But where have I
seen him?"

And from that point their talk was blighted; the heart seemed to go out
of her. Mr. Brumley she felt was no longer taking in what she was
saying. At the time she couldn't in any way share his preoccupation. But
what had been difficult before became hopeless and she could no longer
feel that even presently she would be able to make him understand the
peculiar alternatives before her. They drifted back by the great
conservatory and the ornamental water, aripple with ducks and swans, to
the gates where his taxi waited.

Even then it occurred to her that she ought to tell him something of the
new situation. But now their time was running out, she would have to be
concise, and what wife could ever say abruptly and offhand that
frequent fact, "Oh, by the by, my husband is jealous of you"? Then she
had an impulse to tell him simply, without any explanation at all, that
for a time he must not meet her. And while she gathered herself together
for that, his preoccupations intervened again.

He stood up in the open taxi-cab and looked back.

"That chap," he said, "is following us."

Sec.5

The effect of this futile interview upon Lady Harman was remarkable. She
took to herself an absurd conviction that this inconclusiveness had been
an achievement. Confronted by a dilemma, she had chosen neither horn and
assumed an attitude of inoffensive defiance. Springs in England vary
greatly in their character; some are easterly and quarrelsome, some are
north-westerly and wetly disastrous, a bleak invasion from the ocea