‘Torp Towers,’ Griggs observed, with a smile.

’Yes.  I could hardly help laughing when he told me he had changed its name.’

‘It’s worth seeing,’ said Griggs.  ’A big old house, all full of other people’s ghosts.’

‘Ghosts?’

’I mean figuratively.  It’s full of things that remind one of the people who lived there.  It has one of the oldest parks in England.  Lots of pheasants, too—­but that cannot last long.’

‘Why not?’

’He won’t let any one shoot them!  They will all die of overcrowding in two or three years.  His keepers are three men from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’

‘What a mad idea!’ Margaret laughed.  ‘Is he a Buddhist?’

‘No.’  Paul Griggs knew something about Buddhism.  ’Certainly not!  He’s eccentric.  That’s all.’

They were at the pier.  Half-an-hour later they were in the train together, and there was no one else in the carriage.  Miss More and little Ida had disappeared directly after landing, but Margaret had seen Mr. Van Torp get into a carriage on the window of which was pasted the label of the rich and great:  ‘Reserved.’  She could have had the same privilege if she had chosen to ask for it or pay for it, but it irritated her that he should treat himself like a superior being.  Everything he did either irritated her or frightened her, and she found herself constantly thinking of him and wishing that he would get out at the first station.  Griggs was silent too, and Margaret thought he really might have taken some trouble to amuse her.

She had Lushington’s book on her knee, for she had found it less interesting than she had expected, and was rather ashamed of not having finished it before meeting him, since it had been given to her.  She thought he might come down as far as Rugby to meet her, and she was quite willing that he should find her with it in her hand.  A literary man is always supposed to be flattered at finding a friend reading his last production, as if he did not know that the friend has probably grabbed the volume with undignified haste the instant he was on the horizon, with the intention of being discovered deep in it.  Yet such little friendly frauds are sweet compared with the extremes of brutal frankness to which our dearest friends sometimes think it their duty to go with us, for our own good.

After a time Griggs spoke to her, and she was glad to hear his voice.  She had grown to like him during the voyage, even more than she had ever thought probable.  She had even gone so far as to wonder whether, if he had been twenty-five years younger, he might not have been the one man she had ever met whom she might care to marry, and she had laughed at the involved terms of the hypothesis as soon as she thought of it.  Griggs had never been married, but elderly people remembered that there had been some romantic tale about his youth, when he had been an unknown young writer struggling for life as a newspaper correspondent.