tion was fixed.
He noticed that she looked worn. There were shadows about her eyes, her
colour had lost its freshness, and there was a melancholy droop about the
corners of her mouth. Fielding suggested the advisability of a change.

'I'm to have one,' said she. 'I'm going down to stay with my uncle at
Bentbridge in a week's time.'

'At Bentbridge?' asked Fielding sharply. 'For the election.'

She saw his lips tighten. 'My husband goes with me,' she replied
quickly and stopped, flushing as she realised that she had meant and
conveyed an apology.

'I should have thought that the Continent would have been more advisable
as a change.'

'The Continent! I don't want to travel far. I am so tired.' She spoke in
a tone of weariness which touched Fielding in spite of himself. He looked
at her more closely. 'Yes,' he said gently, 'you look very tired. You
have been doing too much.'

'No, it isn't that,' she replied. 'One thinks of things, that's all.' She
bent her head and was silent for a little, tracing a pattern on the
table-cloth with a finger absently. Then she added in a low voice, 'I
suppose few women ever think at all until after they are married.'

The voice was low, and Fielding was conscious of something new in the
tone of it, a deeper vibration, a sincerity different in kind from that
surface frankness which he had always known in her. He wondered whether
she had struck down from her pinchbeck sentimentality into something that
rang solid in the depths of her nature. He looked at her again, her eyes
were turned to his. With the shadows about them, they looked bigger,
darker, more piteously appealing. She was no less a child to him, the
child looked out of her eyes, sounded in the commonplace sentiment she
had spoken, and the air of originality with which she had spoken it. But
the child seemed beginning to learn the lesson of womanhood, and from the
one mistress which could teach it her.

'But why think then?' he asked lightly. 'It ruins a complexion no less
than before. Or does a complexion cease to count? Look!' He leaned
forward. A pink carnation was in a glass in front of him, already
withering from the heat. He touched the faded tips of the petals. 'That
is the colour which conies from thinking.'

Clarice lifted her shoulders with more of sadness than impatience in the
gesture. 'You believe,' she said, 'no woman at all has a right to dare
to think.'

'I notice,' he answered with the same levity, 'that