“Your aunts are not at home?”

“No.  They have gone for their drive.  Did you wish to see them?”

“I am in terror of your Aunt Winifred.  She and I had many ructions when I was small.  She thought our keepers used to shoot her cats.”

“They probably did!”

“Of course.  But a keeper who told the truth about it would have no moral sense.”

They both laughed, looking into each other’s faces with a sudden sense of relief from tension.  After all the tragedy and the pain, there they were, still young, still in the same world together.  And the sun was still shining and flowers blooming.  Yet, all the same, there was no thought of any renewal of their old relation on either side.  Something unexpressed, yet apparently final, seemed to stand between them; differing very much in his mind from the something in hers, yet equally potent.  She, who had gone through agonies of far too tender pity for him, felt now a touch of something chill and stern in the circumstance surrounding him that seemed to put her aside.  “This is not your business,” it seemed to say; so that she saw herself as an inexperienced child playing with that incalculable thing—­the male.  Attempts at sympathy or advice died away—­she rebelled, and submitted.

Still there are things—­experiments—­that even an inexperienced child, a child “of good will” may venture.  All the time that she was talking to Falloden, a secret expectation, a secret excitement ran through her inner mind.  There was a garden door to her left, across a lawn.  Her eyes were often on it, and her ear listened for the click of the latch.

Meanwhile Falloden talked very frankly of the family circumstances and his own plans.  How changed the tone was since they had discussed the same things, riding through the Lathom Woods in June!  There was little less self-confidence, perhaps; but the quality of it was not the same.  Instead of alienating, it began to touch and thrill her.  And her heart could not help its sudden tremor when he spoke of wintering “in or near Oxford.”  There was apparently a Merton prize fellowship in December on which his hopes were set, and the first part of his bar examination to read for, whether he got a fellowship or no.

“And Parliament?” she asked him.

“Yes—­that’s my aim,” he said quietly.  “Of course it’s the fashion just now, especially in Oxford, to scoff at politics and the House of Commons.  It’s like the ‘art-for-arters’ in town.  As if you could solve anything by words—­or paints!”

“Your father was in the House for some time?”

She bent towards him, as she mentioned his father, with a lovely unconscious gesture that sent a tremor through him.  He seemed to perceive all that shaken feeling in her mind to which she found it so impossible to give expression; on which his own action had placed so strong a curb.

He replied that his father had been in Parliament for some twelve years, and had been a Tory Whip part of the time.  Then he paused, his eyes on the grass, till he raised them to say abruptly: