‘You are nobleness itself!’ he cried, from the depths of his heart.  ’I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer—­the most incapable, clumsy idiot.’

She smiled, but she could not answer.  And in a few more moments voices and steps could be heard approaching, and the scene was over.

CHAPTER VI

The Sunday party separated at Paddington on the night of the Nuneham expedition, and Wallace and Eustace Kendal walked eastward together.  The journey home had been very quiet.  Miss Bretherton had been forced to declare herself ‘extremely tired,’ and Mrs. Stuart’s anxiety and sense of responsibility about her had communicated themselves to the rest of the party.

‘It is the effect of my long day yesterday,’ she said apologetically to Forbes, who hovered about her with those affectionate attentions which a man on the verge of old age pays with freedom to a young girl.  ’It won’t do to let the public see so much of me in future.  But I don’t want to spoil our Sunday.  Talk to me, and I shall forget it.’

Wallace, who had had his eyes about him when she and Eustace Kendal emerged from the wood in view of the rest of the party, was restless and ill at ease, but there was no getting any information, even by a gesture, from Kendal, who sat in his corner diligently watching the moonlight on the flying fields, or making every now and then some disjointed attempts at conversation with Mrs. Stuart.

At the station Miss Bretherton’s carriage was waiting; the party of gentlemen saw her and Mrs. Stuart, who insisted on taking her home, into it; the pale, smiling face bent forward; she waved her hand in response to the lifted hats, and she was gone.

‘Well?’ said Wallace, with a world of inquiry in his voice, as he and Kendal turned eastward.

‘It has been an unfortunate business,’ said Kendal abruptly.  ’I never did a thing worse, I think, or spent a more painful half-hour.’

Wallace’s face fell.  ’I wish I hadn’t bored you with my confounded affairs,’ he exclaimed.  ‘It was too bad!’

Kendal was inclined to agree inwardly, for he was in a state of irritable reaction; but he had the justice to add aloud, ’It was I who was the fool to undertake it.  And I think, indeed, it could have been done, but that circumstances, which neither you nor I had weighed sufficiently, were against it.  She is in a nervous, shaken state, mentally and physically, and before I had had time to discuss the point at all, she had carried it on to the personal ground, and the thing was up.’

‘She is deeply offended, then?’

’Not at all, in the ordinary sense; she is too fine a creature; but she talked of the “contempt” that you and I feel for her!’

‘Good heavens!’ cried Wallace, feeling most unjustly persuaded that his friend had bungled the matter horribly.

‘Yes,’ said Kendal deliberately; ’"contempt,” that was it.  I don’t know how it came about.  All I know is, that what I said, which seemed to me very harmless, was like a match to a mine.  But she told me to tell you that she made no further claim on Elvira.  So the play is safe.’