A pause.  Roger has forgotten the partridges.  He is sunk in reflection.

“Was there ever any talk of this before?” he says, presently, with a hesitating and doubtful accent, and an altogether staggered look.  “Had you any reason—­any ground for thinking that he cared about her?”

“Great ground,” reply I, touching my cheeks with the tips of my fingers, and feeling, with a sense of self-gratulation, that their temperature is gradually, if slowly, lowering, “every ground—­at one time!”

“At what time!”

“In the autumn,” say I, slowly; my mind reluctantly straying back to the season of my urgent invitations, of my pressing friendlinesses, “and at Christmas, and after Christmas.”

“Yes?” (with a quick eagerness, as if expecting to hear more).

“The boys,” continue I, speaking without any ease or fluency, for the subject is always one irksome and difficult to me, “the boys took it quite for granted—­looked upon it as a certain thing that he meant seriously until—­”

“Until what?” (almost snatching the words out of my mouth).

“Until—­well!” (with a short, forced laugh), “until they found that he did not.”

“And—­do you know?—­but of course you do—­can you tell me how they discovered that?”

He is looking at me with that same greedy anxiety in his eyes, which I remember in our last fatal conversation about Musgrave.

“He went away,” reply I, unable any longer to keep watch and ward over my countenance and voice, rising and walking hastily to the window.

The moment I have done it, I repent. However red I was, however confused I looked, it would have been better to have remained and faced him.  For several minutes there is silence.  I look out at the stiff comeliness of the variously tinted asters, at the hoary-colored dew that is like a film along the morning grass.  I do not know what he looks at, because I have my back to him, but I think he is looking at Barbara’s note again.  At least, I judge this by what he says next—­“Poor little soul!” (in an accent of the honestest, tenderest pity), “how happy she seems!”

“Ah!” say I, with a bitter little laugh, “she will mend of that, will not she?”

He does not echo my mirth; indeed, I think I hear him sigh.

  “’Romances paint at full length people’s wooings,
  But only give a bust of marriages!’”

say I, in soft quotation, addressing rather myself and my thoughts than my companion.

He has joined me; he, too, is looking out at the serene aster-flowers, at the glittering glory of the dew.

“Since when you have learned to quote ‘Don Juan?’” he asks, with a sort of surprise.

“Since when?” I reply, with the same tart playfulness—­“oh! since I married!  I date all my accomplishments from then!—­it is my anno Domini.”

Another silence.  Then Sir Roger speaks again, and this time his words seem as slow and difficult of make as mine were just now.