And yet there was really a gulf between her and the ordinary worldling.  It consisted in little else than a double dose of personality—­a richer supply of nerve and emotion.  She could not imagine life without money, because she had always lived with rich people.  But money was the mere substratum; what really mattered was the excitement of loving, and being loved.  She had adored her parents with an absorbing affection.  Then, as she grew up, everywhere in her Roman life, among her girl friends, or the handsome youths she remembered riding in the Villa Borghese gymkhana, she began to be aware of passion and sex; she caught the hints of them, as it were of a lightning playing through the web of life, flashing, and then gone—­illuminating or destroying.  Her mind was full of love stories.  At twenty she had been the confidante of many, both from her married and her unmarried friends.  It was all, so far, a great mystery to her.  But there was in her a thrilled expectation.  Not of a love, tranquil and serene, such as shone on her parents’ lives, but of something overwhelming and tempestuous; into which she might fling her life as one flings a flower into the current of Niagara.

It was the suggestion of such a possibility that had drawn her first to Douglas Falloden.  For three golden days she had imagined herself blissfully in love with him.  Then had come disillusion and repulsion.  What was violent and imperious in him had struck on what was violent and imperious in her.  She had begun to hold him off—­to resist him.  And that resistance had been more exciting even than the docility of the first phase.  It had ended in his proposal, the snatched kiss, and a breach.  And now, she had little idea of what would happen; and would say to herself, recklessly, that she did not care.  Only she must see him—­must go on exploring him.  And as for allowing her intimacy with him to develop in any ordinary way—­under the eyes of the Hoopers—­or of Oxford—­it was not to be thought of.  Rather than be tamely handed over to him in a commonplace wooing, she would have broken off all connection with him; and that she had not the strength to do.

* * * * *

“Here is the gate, my lady.”

The man produced a key from his pocket and got down to open it.  Constance passed into a green world.  Three “drives” converged in front of her, moss-carpeted, and close-roofed by oak-wood in its first rich leaf.  After the hot sun on the straight and shadeless road outside, these cool avenues stretching away into a forest infinity, seemed to beckon a visitant towards some distant Elysian scene—­some glade haunted of Pan.

Constance looked down them eagerly.  Which was she to take?—­suddenly, far down the right hand drive, a horseman—­coming into view.  He perceived her, gave a touch to his horse, and was quickly beside her.

Both were conscious of the groom, who had reined in a few yards behind, and sat impassive.