She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved like a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that although Mr. Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did seem to have stamped out rabies, yet you couldn’t be too careful with a dog bite.  A dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways—­particularly Sultan’s bite.  He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog.  Both the elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham’s wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of Amanda from imminent danger—­ “she’s always so reckless with those dogs,” as though Amanda was not manifestly capable of taking care of herself; and when he had been Listerined and bandaged, they would have it that he should join them at their supper-dinner, which was already prepared and waiting.  They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they took his arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew.  He must stay in Harting that night.  Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for miles and miles. . . .

The house was a little long house with a verandah and a garden in front of it with flint-edged paths; the room in which they sat and ate was long and low and equipped with pieces of misfitting good furniture, an accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a sprinkling of old and middle-aged books.  Some one had lit a fire, which cracked and spurted about cheerfully in a motherly fireplace, and a lamp and some candles got lit.  Mrs. Wilder, Amanda’s aunt, a comfortable dark broad-browed woman, directed things, and sat at the end of the table and placed Benham on her right hand between herself and Amanda.  Amanda’s mother remained undeveloped, a watchful little woman with at least an eyebrow like her daughter’s.  Her name, it seemed, was Morris.  No servant appeared, but two cousins of a vague dark picturesqueness and with a stamp of thirty upon them, the first young women Benham had ever seen dressed in djibbahs, sat at the table or moved about and attended to the simple needs of the service.  The reconciled dogs were in the room and shifted inquiring noses from one human being to another.

Amanda’s people were so easy and intelligent and friendly, and Benham after his thirty hours of silence so freshly ready for human association, that in a very little while he could have imagined he had known and trusted this household for years.  He had never met such people before, and yet there was something about them that seemed familiar—­and then it occurred to him that something of their easy-going freedom was to be found in Russian novels.  A photographic enlargement of somebody with a vegetarian expression of face and a special kind of slouch hat gave the atmosphere a flavour of Socialism, and a press and tools and stamps and pigments on an oak table in the corner suggested some such socialistic