conversationalists, and as cold as
icicles."

"Yes."

"Two: We dress beautifully and use extravagant means to compass our
ends in this direction."

"Yes."

"Three: We keep our overworked husbands under strict discipline."

"Yes! I say,--I don't like this game."

"Neither do I, but it's very much played,--"

"Four: We prefer hotels to home life and don't bring up our children
well."

"Yes."

"Five: We interfere with the proper game laws by bagging English
husbands instead of staying on our own preserves. That's about all, I
think. Were not those rumours tolerably familiar to you in the
ha'penny papers and their human counterparts?"

Lavendar was so amused by this direct storming of his opinion that he
could hardly keep his laughter within bounds. "I've heard one other
criticism," he said, "that you were all pretty and all had small feet
and hands! I am now able to declare that to be a base calumny and to
hope that all the others will prove just as false!" Then Robinette
laughed too; eyes, lips, cheeks! When Lavendar looked at her he wished
that his father would keep him at Stoke Revel for a month.

The sun was going down now, and the rising tide came swelling up from
the sea, lifting itself and silently swelling the volume of the river,
in a way that had something awful about it. The whole current of the
great stream was against it, but behind was the force of the sea and
so it filled and filled with hardly a ripple, as the heart is filled
with a new desire. Up from the mouth of the river came a faint breeze
bringing the taste of the ocean into the deeply wooded creeks. It had
freshened into a little wind, as they drew up at the boat-house, that
flapped Robinette's blue cape about her, and dyed the colour in her
cheeks to a livelier tint. As they walked up the narrow pathway to the
house a deep silence fell between them that neither attempted to
break.

At the top of the hill, she paused to take breath, and look across the
river. It was half dark already there, on the other side in the deep
shadow of the hill; and a lamp in the window of the cottage shone like
a star beside the faintly green shape of the budding plum tree.

As Robinette entered the door of the Manor House she took out her
little gold-meshed purse and handed Mark Lavendar a penny.

"It's none too much," she said, meeting his astonished gaze with a
smile. "I should have had to pay it on the public ferry, and you were
ever so much nicer