They both laughed.  Cynthia remembered very well.  That scrape, for instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village school-master—­a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford grand-pere. Or that much worse scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:—­an angry grandfather breathing fire and slaughter.  Certainly in those days Philip had been unusually—­remarkably susceptible.  Cynthia remembered him as always in or out of a love-affair, while she to whom he never made love was alternately champion and mentor.  In those days, he had no expectation of the estates or the title.  He was plain Philip Bliss, with an artistic and literary turn, great personal charm, and a temperament that invited catastrophes.  That was before he went to Paris and Rome for serious work at painting.  Seven years he had been away from England, and she had never seen him.  He had announced his marriage to her in a short note containing hardly any particulars—­except that his wife was a student like himself, and that he intended to live abroad and work.  Some four years later, the Times contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife’s death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two—­pessimist and dilettante—­who had returned.  His lameness he ascribed to an accident in the Alps, but would never say anything more about it; and his friends presently learned to avoid the subject, and to forget the slight signs of something unexplained which had made them curious at first.

In the intervening years before the war, Cynthia felt tolerably sure that she had been his only intimate woman friend.  His former susceptibility seemed to have vanished.  On the whole he avoided women’s society.  Some years after his return he had inherited the title and the estates, and might have been one of the most invited men in London had he wished to be; while Cynthia could remember at least three women, all desirable, who would have liked to marry him.  The war had swept him more decidedly than ever out of the ordinary current of society.  He had made it both an excuse and a shield.  His work was paramount; and even his old friends had lost sight of him.  He lived and breathed for an important Committee of the Admiralty, on which as time went on he took a more and more important place.  In the four years Cynthia had scarcely seen him more than half a dozen times.