ishment at seeing him here. Do you find him easy to get on with?"

"Perfectly." She became absorbed in picking the broken feathers out of
her fan. She took no interest in Mr. Flaxman Reed. What she wanted was
to be roused, stimulated by contact with a great intellect; and the
precious opportunity was slipping minute by minute from her grasp.
Wyndham was wasting it in deliberate trivialities. She longed to draw
him into some subject, large and deep, where their sympathies could
touch, their thoughts expand and intermingle. She continued tentatively,
with a suggestion of self-restrained suffering in her voice, "I don't
think I have any right to discuss Mr. Reed. You know--I have no firm
faith, no settled opinions."

It was an opening into the larger air, a very little one; she had no
knowledge or skill to make it bigger, but she was determined to show
herself a woman abreast of her time. Wyndham leaned back and looked at
her through half-opened eyelids.

"You are no longer convinced of the splendid logic of the Roman faith?"

She started. His words recalled vividly that evening at Oxford, though
she would not have recognised them as hers but for the quotation marks
indicated by Wyndham's tone.

"No--that was a year ago. What did you know about me then?"

"Nothing. I divined much."

"You are right. How well you remember!" She leaned forward. Her face was
animated, eager, in its greed of sympathy, understanding,
acknowledgment. Clear and insistent, with a note as of delicate irony,
the little porcelain clock in the corner sounded eleven. Knowles and
others were making a move. Wyndham rose.

"I remember most things worth remembering."

Five minutes afterwards Audrey, wrapt in thought, was still standing
where Wyndham had left her. Miss Craven and Katherine had gone upstairs,
and she was alone with Ted. Suddenly she clenched her hands together, at
the full length of her white arms, and turned to him in an agony of
tenderness, clinging to him like an overwrought child, and lavishing
more sweetness on him than she had done since the day of their
engagement. Ted was touched with the unusual pathos of her manner. He
put it down to sorrow at their separation during the whole of a long
evening.

CHAPTER X

It was the third week in August; summer was dying, as a London summer
dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere
there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in deat