He stayed to puff his cigarette.

“Oh, Rudolph dear, don’t—­don’t be just a merry-Andrew!” she cried impulsively, before he had time to continue, which she perceived he meant to do, as if it did not matter.

And he took her full meaning, quite as he had been used in the old times to discourse upon a half-sentence.  “I am afraid I am that, rather,” he said, reflectively.  “But then Clarice and I could hardly have weathered scandal except by making ourselves particularly agreeable to everybody.  And somehow I got into the habit of making people laugh.  It isn’t very difficult.  I am rather an adept at telling stories which just graze impropriety, for instance.  You know, they call me the social triumph of my generation.  And people are glad to see me because I am ’so awfully funny’ and ‘simply killing’ and so on.  And I suppose it tells in the long run—­like the dyer’s hand, you know.”

“It does tell.”  Anne was thinking it would always tell.  And that, too, would be John Charteris’s handiwork.

Ensued a silence.  Rudolph Musgrave was painstakingly intent upon his cigarette.  A nestward-plunging bird called to his mate impatiently.  Then Anne shook her head impatiently.

“Come, while I’m thinking, I will drive you back to Lichfield.”

“Oh, no; that wouldn’t do at all,” he said, with absolute decision.  “No, you see I have to return the boy.  And I can’t quite imagine your carriage waiting at the doors of ‘that Mrs. Pendomer.’”

“Oh,” Anne fleetingly thought, “he would have understood.”  But aloud she only said:  “And do you think I hate her any longer?  Yes, it is true I hated her until to-day, and now I’m just sincerely sorry for her.  For she and I—­and you and even the child yonder—­and all that any of us is to-day—­are just so many relics of John Charteris.  Yet he has done with us—­at last!”

She said this with an inhalation of the breath; but she did not look at him.

“Take care!” he said, with an unreasonable harshness.  “For I forewarn you I am imagining vain things.”

“I’m not afraid, somehow.”  But Anne did not look at him.

He saw as with a rending shock how like the widow of John Charteris was to Anne Willoughby; and unforgotten pulses, very strange and irrational and dear, perplexed him sorely.  He debated, and flung aside the cigarette as an out-moded detail of his hobbling part.

“You say I did a noble thing for you.  I tried to.  But quixotism has its price.  To-day I am not quite the man who did that thing.  John Charteris has set his imprint too deep upon us.  We served his pleasure.  We are not any longer the boy and girl who loved each other.”

She waited in the rising twilight with a yet averted face.  The world was motionless, ineffably expectant, as it seemed to him.  And the disposition of all worldly affairs, the man dimly knew, was very anciently prearranged by an illimitable and, upon the whole, a kindly wisdom.