art for Italy as he was to hear that she had done
so.

This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of
August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the
daily post. At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as
everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was
content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his
letters. But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his
letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do
his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily
constitutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of
official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer's shop in the
village, some two miles off.

For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished
him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends
in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France
began to seem to him extraordinary! However, at last, the monotony of the
Etretat postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons. 'We are here for
the night on some business of Paul's; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin,
and two or three days later at Venice. By the way, where will the
Brethertons be? I must trust to my native wits, I suppose, when I get
there. She is not the sort of light to be hidden under a bushel.'

This postcard disturbed Kendal not a little, and he felt irritably that
somebody had mismanaged matters. He had supposed, and indeed suggested,
that Miss Bretherton should enclose his note in one of her own to his
sister's Paris address, giving, at the same time, some indication of a
place of meeting in Venice. But if she had not done this, it was very
possible that the two women might miss each other after all. Sometimes,
when he had been contemplating this possibility with disgust, he would
with a great effort make himself reflect why it was that he cared about
the matter so disproportionately. Why was he so deeply interested in
Isabel Bretherton's movements abroad, and in the meeting which would
bring her, so to speak, once more into his own world? Why! because it was
impossible, he would answer himself indignantly, not to feel a profound
interest in any woman who had ever shared as much emotion with you as she
had with him in those moments at Nuneham, who had received a wound at
your hands, had winced under i