an playing bowls. Enormous, busy, pleased, and upright as a
soldier, pathetically trotting his vast carcass from end to end, he
delighted Shelton. But Antonia threw a single look at the huge creature,
and her face expressed disgust. She began running up towards the ruined
tower.

Shelton let her keep in front, watching her leap from stone to stone and
throw back defiant glances when he pressed behind. She stood at the top,
and he looked up at her. Over the world, gloriously spread below, she,
like a statue, seemed to rule. The colour was brilliant in her cheeks,
her young bosom heaved, her eyes shone, and the flowing droop of her
long, full sleeves gave to her poised figure the look of one who flies.
He pulled himself up and stood beside her; his heart choked him, all the
colour had left his cheeks.

"Antonia," he said, "I love you."

She started, as if his whisper had intruded on her thoughts; but his
face must have expressed his hunger, for the resentment in her eyes
vanished.

They stood for several minutes without speaking, and then went home.
Shelton painfully revolved the riddle of the colour in her face. Had he
a chance then? Was it possible? That evening the instinct vouchsafed at
times to lovers in place of reason caused him to pack his bag and go to
Cannes. On returning, two days later, and approaching the group in the
centre of the Winter Garden, the voice of the maiden aunt reading aloud
an extract from the Morning Post reached him across the room.

"Don't you think that's rather nice?" he heard her ask, and then: "Oh,
here you aye! It's very nice to see you back!"

Shelton slipped into a wicker chair. Antonia looked up quickly from her
sketch-book, put out a hand, but did not speak.

He watched her bending head, and his eagerness was changed to gloom.
With desperate vivacity he sustained the five intolerable minutes of
inquiry, where had he been, what had he been doing? Then once again the
maiden aunt commenced her extracts from the Morning Post.

A touch on his sleeve startled him. Antonia was leaning forward; her
cheeks were crimson above the pallor of her neck.

"Would you like to see my sketches?"

To Shelton, bending above those sketches, that drawl of the well-bred
maiden aunt intoning the well-bred paper was the most pleasant sound
that he had ever listened to.

"My dear Dick," Mrs. Dennant said to him a fortnight later, "we would
rather, after you leave here, that you don't see each oth