"I am trying to invent an answer," Acton confessed.

"Have you none ready?"

"None that I can tell you," he said. "But let me walk with you now."

"You may do as you like."

She moved slowly along the road, and Acton went with her. Presently he
said, "If I had done as I liked I would have come to see you several
times."

"Is that invented?" asked Eugenia.

"No, that is natural. I stayed away because"--

"Ah, here comes the reason, then!"

"Because I wanted to think about you."

"Because you wanted to lie down!" said the Baroness. "I have seen you
lie down--almost--in my drawing-room."

Acton stopped in the road, with a movement which seemed to beg her to
linger a little. She paused, and he looked at her awhile; he thought her
very charming. "You are jesting," he said; "but if you are really going
away it is very serious."

"If I stay," and she gave a little laugh, "it is more serious still!"

"When shall you go?"

"As soon as possible."

"And why?"

"Why should I stay?"

"Because we all admire you so."

"That is not a reason. I am admired also in Europe." And she began to
walk homeward again.

"What could I say to keep you?" asked Acton. He wanted to keep her, and
it was a fact that he had been thinking of her for a week. He was in
love with her now; he was conscious of that, or he thought he was; and
the only question with him was whether he could trust her.

"What you can say to keep me?" she repeated. "As I want very much to go
it is not in my interest to tell you. Besides, I can't imagine."

He went on with her in silence; he was much more affected by what she
had told him than appeared. Ever since that evening of his return from
Newport her image had had a terrible power to trouble him. What Clifford
Wentworth had told him--that had affected him, too, in an adverse sense;
but it had not liberated him from the discomfort of a charm of which his
intelligence was impatient. "She is not honest, she is not honest," he
kept murmuring to himself. That is what he had been saying to the summer
sky, ten minutes before. Unfortunately, he was unable to say it
finally, definitively; and now that he was near her it seemed to matter
wonderfully little. "She is a woman who will lie," he had said to
himself. Now, as he went along, he reminded himself of this observation;
but it failed to frighten him as it had done before. He almost wished he
could make her lie and then convict her of it, so that he might