Fielding agreed that he had.

‘I have not seen him,’ she added.

‘No?’

‘No.’  Clarice was driven to name the companion.  ’You seem to have struck up a great friendship with Mr. Drake.  I should hardly have thought that you would have found much in common.’

‘Arcades ambo, don’t you know?’

Clarice did not know, and being by this time exasperated, she showed that she did not.  Fielding explained blandly, ’We both drive the same pigs to the same market.’

Clarice laughed shortly, and stroked the cover of her Morte d’Arthur.  ‘I suppose that’s just what friendship means nowadays?’

’Between man and man—­yes.  Between woman and woman it’s different, and it’s, of course, different too between man and woman.  But perhaps that’s best to be understood by means of its symbol,’ and he worked up to his climax of cold boiled mutton with complete satisfaction.

‘I gather, then, that you see nothing of Mrs. Willoughby now,’ said Clarice quietly as soon as he had stopped.  Fielding was for the moment taken aback.  It seemed to him that the point of view was unfair.  ‘Widows,’ he replied with great sententiousness,—­’widows are different,’ and he took his leave without explaining wherein the difference lay.  He wondered, however, if Clarice’s point of view had occurred to Mrs. Willoughby.

Fielding’s visit, and in particular his teasing reticence as to his stay in Matanga, had the effect of recalling Clarice’s thoughts to the subject of Stephen Drake.  She recalled her old impression of him as one self-centred and self-sufficing, a man to whom nothing outside himself would make any tangible difference; but she recalled it without a trace of the apprehension with which it had been previously coupled.  She began indeed to dwell upon that idea of him as upon something restful, and the idea was still prominent in her mind when, a little more than a week afterwards, Drake galloped up to her one morning as she was crossing the Park.

‘I have been meaning to call, Mrs. Mallinson,’ he said, ’but the fact is, I have had no time.  I only got back from Bentbridge last night.’

Clarice received a sudden and yet expected impression of freshness from him.  ‘Papa told me you were going to stand,’ she replied.  ’You stayed with my uncle, Captain Le Mesurier, didn’t you?’

’Yes.  Funnily enough, I have met him before, although I didn’t know his name.  He travelled in the carriage with me from Plymouth to London when I first landed in England.’

Clarice wondered what made him pause for a moment in the middle of the sentence.  ‘Your chances are promising?’ she asked.

’I can’t say yet.  I have a Radical lord against me.  Burl says there’s no opponent more dangerous.  It will be a close fight, I think.’  He threw back his head and opened his chest.  His voice rang with a vigorous enjoyment in the anticipation of a strenuous contest.