such very ancient history. And yet he had
gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder--men were so odd.

So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had
lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay
with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as
if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been
very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an
essential part of being fond of St. John--a rule of the game, so to
speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at
all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that
stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other
people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your
wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate
understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects.
Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral
draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a
doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in
towns got on his nerves.

"But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very
seriously what an intimate gesture it was.

Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with
her in her bedroom. St. John didn't like it at all. There was to him
something inherently disreputable about the horizontal. If she were too
tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one--except
him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn't do).

"But my back does ache so easily. After all, if I were really ill you
wouldn't mind."

"That is different."

"How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the
presence of a young man?" He consoled himself with the thought that she
was extremely, exceptionally innocent. She told him that thousands of
people were extremely, exceptionally innocent. It was a fact which could
never be explained to juries. St. John doubted it. He believed in a vast
number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the
people he knew were exceptions.

The train drew up at the platform. Ariadne got out. The footman
explained to her that his Lordship was so very sorry not to be able to
come to the station, but he was attending a cattle show.

"Of course," said Ariadne, and she f