to give her up....  She was the kind of woman who, if she once let herself go, would play the devil.  Turning from the fire he looked into the glass....  He admitted to eight-and-thirty, he was forty—­a very well-preserved forty.  There were times when he did not look more than five-and-thirty.  His hair was paler than it used to be; it was growing a little thin on the forehead, otherwise he was the same as when he was five-and-twenty.  But he was forty, and a man of forty cannot marry a prima donna of twenty.  Five pleasant years they might have together, five delicious years; it were vain to expect more.  But he would not get her to go away with him under a promise of marriage; all such deception he held to be as dishonourable as cheating at cards.  So in their next interview it would have to be suggested that there could be no question of marriage, at least for the present.  At the same time he would have her understand that he intended to shirk no responsibility.  But if he were to tire of her!  That was another possibility, and a hateful one; he would prefer that she should jilt him.  Perhaps it would be better to give her up, and throw his fate in with the list.  But he was tired of country houses, with or without a liaison, and felt that he could not go through another season’s hunting; he had no horses that suited him, and didn’t seem to be able to find any.  To go abroad with Evelyn, watch over the cultivation of her voice, see her fame rising, that was his mission!  The only question to decide was whether he was in love with her.  He would not hesitate a moment if he were only sure of that.  He thought of the women he knew.  Georgina was the first to come up in his mind.  He had been to see her, and had come away at a loss to understand what he had ever seen in her.  She had struck him as vulgar and middle-class, sly, with a taste for intrigue.  He remembered that was how she had struck him when he first saw her.  But if anyone had described her as vulgar and middle-class six months ago.  Good heavens!

CHAPTER SEVEN

The day grew too fine, as he said, for false notes, so the music lesson was abandoned, and they went to sit in the garden behind the picture gallery, a green sward with high walls covered with creeper, and at one end a great cedar with a seat built about the trunk; a quiet place rife with songs of birds, and unfrequented save by them.  They had taken with them Omar’s verses, and Evelyn hoped that he would talk to her about them, for the garden of the Persian poet she felt to be separated only by a wicket from theirs.  But Owen did not respond to her humour.  He was prepense to argue about the difficulties of her life, and of the urgent necessity of vanquishing these.

He had noticed, he said, as they sat in the park, that she had a weak face.  Her thoughts were far away; he had caught her face, as it were, napping, and had seen through it to the root of her being.  The conclusion at which he had arrived was that she was not capable of leading an independent life.