the latest book on their tables.  They give parties, river parties, parties where you play games.  There’s no difficulty in conceiving incidents; the difficulty is to put them into shape—­not to get run away with, as Lady Theo was.  It ended disastrously for her, poor woman, for the book, as I planned it, was going to end in profound and sordid respectability.  Disowned by her father, she marries my hero, and they live in a snug little villa outside Croydon, in which town he is set up as a house agent.  He never succeeds in becoming a real gentleman after all.  That’s the interesting part of it.  Does it seem to you the kind of book you’d like to read?” he enquired; “or perhaps you’d like my Stuart tragedy better,” he continued, without waiting for her to answer him.  “My idea is that there’s a certain quality of beauty in the past, which the ordinary historical novelist completely ruins by his absurd conventions.  The moon becomes the Regent of the Skies.  People clap spurs to their horses, and so on.  I’m going to treat people as though they were exactly the same as we are.  The advantage is that, detached from modern conditions, one can make them more intense and more abstract then people who live as we do.”

Rachel had listened to all this with attention, but with a certain amount of bewilderment.  They both sat thinking their own thoughts.

“I’m not like Hirst,” said Hewet, after a pause; he spoke meditatively; “I don’t see circles of chalk between people’s feet.  I sometimes wish I did.  It seems to me so tremendously complicated and confused.  One can’t come to any decision at all; one’s less and less capable of making judgments.  D’you find that?  And then one never knows what any one feels.  We’re all in the dark.  We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person?  One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”

As he said this he was leaning on his elbow arranging and rearranging in the grass the stones which had represented Rachel and her aunts at luncheon.  He was speaking as much to himself as to Rachel.  He was reasoning against the desire, which had returned with intensity, to take her in his arms; to have done with indirectness; to explain exactly what he felt.  What he said was against his belief; all the things that were important about her he knew; he felt them in the air around them; but he said nothing; he went on arranging the stones.

“I like you; d’you like me?” Rachel suddenly observed.

“I like you immensely,” Hewet replied, speaking with the relief of a person who is unexpectedly given an opportunity of saying what he wants to say.  He stopped moving the pebbles.

“Mightn’t we call each other Rachel and Terence?” he asked.

“Terence,” Rachel repeated.  “Terence—­that’s like the cry of an owl.”

She looked up with a sudden rush of delight, and in looking at Terence with eyes widened by pleasure she was struck by the change that had come over the sky behind them.  The substantial blue day had faded to a paler and more ethereal blue; the clouds were pink, far away and closely packed together; and the peace of evening had replaced the heat of the southern afternoon, in which they had started on their walk.