“Yes.  She seems to like it,” said Alice coldly.

Sorell began to talk of his first acquaintance with the Risboroughs, and of Connie’s mother.  There was no hint in what he said of his own passionate affection for his dead friends.  He was not a profaner of shrines.  But what he said brought out the vastness of Connie’s loss in the death of her mother; and he repeated something of what he had heard from others of her utter physical and mental collapse after the double tragedy of the year before.

“Of course you’ll know more about it than I do.  But one of the English doctors in Rome, who is a friend of mine, told me that they thought at one time they couldn’t pull her through.  She seemed to have nothing else to live for.”

“Oh, I don’t think it was as bad as that,” said Alice drily.  “Anyway, she’s quite well and strong now.”

“She’s found a home again.  That’s a great comfort to all her mother’s old friends.”

Sorell smiled upon his companion; the sensitive kindness in his own nature appealing to the natural pity in hers.

But Alice made no reply; and he dropped the subject.

They walked across the park, under a wide summer sky, towards the winding river, and the low blue hills beyond it.  At the Cherwell boat-house they found the two boats, with four or five men, and Nora, as usual, taking charge of everything, at least till Herbert Pryce should appear.

Connie was just stepping into the foremost boat, assisted by Herbert Pryce, who was in his shirt-sleeves, while Lord Meyrick and another Marmion man were already in the boat.

“Sorell, will you stroke the other boat?” said Pryce, “and Miss Nora, will you have a cushion in the bows?  Now I think we’re made up.  No—­we want another lady.  And running his eyes over those still standing on the bank, he called a plump little woman, the wife of a Llandaff tutor, who had been walking with Mrs. Hooper.

“Mrs. Maddison, will you come with us?  I think that will about trim us.”

Mrs. Maddison obeyed him with alacrity, and the first boat pushed off.  Mrs. Hooper, Alice, Sorell, two St. Cyprian undergraduates and Nora’s girl friend, Miss Watson, followed in the second.

Then, while the June evening broadened and declined, the party wound in and out of the curves of the Cherwell.  The silver river, brimming from a recent flood, lay sleepily like a gorged serpent between the hay meadows on either side.  Flowers of the edge, meadow-sweet, ragged-robin and yellow flags, dipped into the water; willows spread their thin green over the embattled white and blue of the sky; here and there a rat plunged or a bird fled shrieking; bushes of wild roses flung out their branches, and everywhere the heat and the odours of a rich open land proclaimed the fulness of the midland summer.