earing about all you've been doing. We
don't make much history in Lashmar."

It was common ground between them that the Warings lacked money for her
to live as independently as all Warings felt that every Waring had a
right to live. Each generation of younger brothers had been confined
within an ever-narrowing circle; and, but for the war, Jack would now be
patiently going the North Eastern Circuit, the first Waring to apply his
mind to law; but for Jack and the money spent on him at Oxford, Agnes
would have gone to Newnham and prepared a career for herself.

"You're too good for this place, you're wasted," Eric broke out after a
moment's silent brooding.

"There's not much choice, is there?"

Eric brooded again.

"Are you happy?" he asked.

"Happier than you are, I think," she answered with a smile.

"Why on earth d'you say that?" he asked in surprise.

"You just seem changed to-night," Agnes replied. "Have you been working
too hard?"

Over his port--which would not stand comparison with any from the artful
little cellar in Ryder Street--Eric tried to settle in his mind how much
she had seen and how much she had imagined. There was assuredly this
much change in him, that to-night Agnes was not even waking him to
dispassionate interest; he had no attention to spare her. And yet it was
not that Barbara had captured his mind; she was nothing but an elf of
mischief, dancing in the sunshine backwards and forwards across his
path, pelting him with flowers, vanishing and reappearing. Restlessness
or discontent must have peeped from behind the suave mask. He had meant
to be more friendly, far more friendly; they had not met for nine
months;--and both were disappointed.

In the drawing-room Agnes kept her chair a few inches behind the circle
of the others, watching, listening and reflecting. Eric seemed to think
that he was still at one of the tiresome long parties where he was
expected to glitter and to be shewn off; he had talked very well at
times, but he felt that he had been making voluble conversation in a
nervous dread of silence between them. His new life was rather turning
him into a public entertainer; he was enigmatic and unapproachable.

3

As Eric, with caution born of experience, lit one of his own cigars and
made room for Geoff at his side, an idea came to him so seductive, so
simple and so compelling that he wondered why he had never thought of it
before. When Geoff asked: "Are you down here for