“You leave such drugs to the aristocracy, Walter,” Garratt Skinner had chimed in.  “Just a taste if you like.  But go gently.”

Sylvia had not been present.  But she conjectured the scene, and her conjecture was not far from the truth.  But why? she asked, and again fear took hold of her.  “What was to be gained?” There were limits to Sylvia’s knowledge of the under side of life.  She did not guess.

She turned to her mirror and looked at herself.  Yes, she looked tired, she looked ill.  But she was not grateful for having the fact pointed out to her.  And while she still looked, she heard her father’s voice calling her.  She shivered, as though her fear once more laid hold on her.  Then she locked the bottle of cocaine away in a drawer and ran lightly down the stairs.

CHAPTER XVIII

BOTH SIDES OF THE QUESTION

Chayne’s house stood high upon a slope of the Sussex Downs.  Built of stone two centuries ago, it seemed gradually to have taken on the brown color of the hill behind it, subduing itself to the general scheme, even as birds and animals will do; so that strangers who searched for it in the valley discovered it by the upward swirl of smoke from its wide chimneys.  On its western side and just beneath the house, there was a cleft in the downs through which the high road ran and in the cleft the houses of a tiny village clustered even as at the foot of some old castle in Picardy.  On the east the great ridge with its shadow-holding hollows, its rounded gorse-strewn slopes of grass, rolled away for ten miles and then dipped suddenly to the banks of the River Arun.  The house faced the south, and from its high-terraced garden, a great stretch of park and forest land was visible, where amidst the green and russet of elm and beach, a cluster of yews set here and there gave the illusion of a black and empty space.  Beyond the forest land a lower ridge of hills rose up, and over that ridge one saw the spires of Chichester and the level flats of Selsea reaching to the sea.

Into this garden Chayne came on the next afternoon, and as he walked along its paths alone he could almost fancy that his dead father paced with the help of his stick at his side, talking, as had been his wont, of this or that improvement needed by the farms, pointing out to him a meadow in the hollow beneath which might soon be coming into the market, and always ending up with the same plea.

“Isn’t it time, Hilary, that you married and came home to look after it all yourself?”