‘We will make one,’ said Kendal, with an inward qualm.  And she fell back again with a nod and a smile.

On they passed, in the blazing sunshine, through Iffley lock and under the green hill crowned with Iffley village and its Norman church.  The hay was out in the fields, and the air was full of it.  Children, in tidy Sunday frocks, ran along the towing-path to look at them; a reflected heaven smiled upon them from the river depths; wild rose-bushes overhung the water, and here and there stray poplars rose like land-marks into the sky.  The heat, after a time, deadened conversation.  Forbes every now and then would break out with some comment on the moving landscape, which showed the delicacy and truth of his painter’s sense, or set the boat alive with laughter by some story of the unregenerate Oxford of his own undergraduate days; but there were long stretches of silence when, except to the rowers, the world seemed asleep, and the regular fall of the oars like the pulsing of a hot dream.

It was past five before they steered into the shadow of Nuneham woods.  The meadows just ahead were a golden blaze of light, but here the shade lay deep and green on the still water, spanned by a rustic bridge, and broken every now and then by the stately whiteness of the swans.  Rich steeply-rising woods shut in the left-hand bank, and foliage, grass, and wild flowers seemed suddenly to have sprung into a fuller luxuriance than elsewhere.

‘It’s too early for tea,’ said Mrs. Stuart’s clear little voice on the bank; ’at least, if we have it directly it will leave such a long time before the train starts.  Wouldn’t a stroll be pleasant first?’

Isabel Bretherton and Kendal only waited for the general assent before they wandered off ahead of the others.  ’I should like very much to have a word with you,’ she had said to him as he handed her out of the boat.  And now, here they were, and, as Kendal felt, the critical moment was come.

‘I only wanted to tell you,’ she said, as they paused in the heart of the wood, a little out of breath after a bit of steep ascent, ’that I have got hold of a play for next October that I think you are rather specially interested in—­at least, Mr. Wallace told me you had heard it all, and given him advice about it while he was writing it.  I want so much to hear your ideas about it.  It always seems to me that you have thought more about the stage and seen more acting than any one else I know, and I care for your opinion very much indeed—­do tell me, if you will, what you thought of Elvira!’

‘Well,’ said Kendal quietly, as he made her give up her wrap to him to carry, ’there is a great deal that’s fine in it.  The original sketch, as the Italian author left it, was good, and Wallace has enormously improved upon it.  Only—­’

‘Isn’t it most dramatic?’ she exclaimed, interrupting him; ’there are so many strong situations in it, and though one might think the subject a little unpleasant if one only heard it described, yet there is nothing in the treatment but what is noble and tragic.  I have very seldom felt so stirred by anything.  I find myself planning the scenes, thinking over them this way and that incessantly.’