Amanda had said that she and the dogs would come with him up the hill, she had said it exactly as a boy might have said it, she had brought him up to the corner of Up Park and had sat down there on a heap of stones and watched him until he was out of sight, waving to him when he looked back.  “Come back again,” she had cried.

In Chichester he found a little green-bound republic in a second-hand book-shop near the Cathedral, but there was no copy of the laws to be found in the place.  Then he was taken with the brilliant idea of sleeping the night in Chichester and going back next day via Harting to Petersfield station and London.  He carried out this scheme and got to South Harting neatly about four o’clock in the afternoon.  He found Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Amanda and the dogs entertaining Mr. Rathbone-Sanders at tea, and they all seemed a little surprised, and, except Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, they all seemed pleased to see him again so soon.  His explanation of why he hadn’t gone back to London from Chichester struck him as a little unconvincing in the cold light of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders’ eye.  But Amanda was manifestly excited by his return, and he told them his impressions of Chichester and described the entertainment of the evening guest at a country inn and suddenly produced his copy of the republic.  “I found this in a book-shop,” he said, “and I brought it for you, because it describes one of the best dreams of aristocracy there has ever been dreamt.”

At first she praised it as a pretty book in the dearest little binding, and then realized that there were deeper implications, and became grave and said she would read it through and through, she loved such speculative reading.

She came to the door with the others and stayed at the door after they had gone in again.  When he looked back at the corner of the road to Petersfield she was still at the door and waved farewell to him.

He only saw a light slender figure, but when she came back into the sitting-room Mr. Rathbone-Sanders noted the faint flush in her cheek and an unwonted abstraction in her eye.

And in the evening she tucked her feet up in the armchair by the lamp and read the republic very intently and very thoughtfully, occasionally turning over a page.

5

When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to perform his social obligations to the utmost.

So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he wrote his South Harting friends a most agreeable letter of thanks for their kindness to him.  In a little while he hoped he should see them again.  His mother, too, was most desirous to meet them. . . .  That done, he went on to his flat and to various aspects of life for which he was quite unprepared.

But here we may note that Amanda answered him.  Her reply came some four days later.  It was written in a square schoolgirl hand, it covered three sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent essay upon the republic of Plato.  “Of course,” she wrote, “the Guardians are inhuman, but it was a glorious sort of inhumanity.  They had a spirit—­like sharp knives cutting through life.”