“Ah, this is better,” said his lordship.

He lit a cigar and walked for some time by my side without speaking, merely flicking the seeding heads off the dying thistles with his walking stick, and then ruckling it through the withered leaves with which the path was strewn.

But half way up the glen he began to look aslant at me through his monocle, and then to talk about my life in Rome, wondering how I could have been content to stay so long at the Convent, and hinting at a rumour which had reached him that I had actually wished to stay there altogether.

“Extraordinary!  ’Pon my word, extraordinary!  It’s well enough for women who have suffered shipwreck in their lives to live in such places, but for a young gal with any fortune, any looks . . . why I wonder she doesn’t die of ennui.”

I was still too nervous and embarrassed to make much protest, so he went on to tell me with what difficulty he supported the boredom of his own life even in London, with its clubs, its race-meetings, its dances, its theatres and music halls, and the amusement to be got out of some of the ladies of society, not to speak of certain well-known professional beauties.

One of his great friends—­his name was Eastcliff—­was going to marry the most famous of the latter class (a foreign dancer at the “Empire"), and since he was rich and could afford to please himself, why shouldn’t he?

When we reached the waterfall at the top of the glen (it had been the North Cape of Martin Conrad), we sat on a rustic seat which stands there, and then, to my still deeper embarrassment, his lordship’s conversation came to close quarters.

Throwing away his cigar and taking his silver-haired terrier on his lap he said: 

“Of course you know what the business is which the gentlemen are discussing in the library?”

As well as I could for the nervousness that was stifling me, I answered that I knew.

He stroked the dog with one hand, prodded his stick into the gravel with the other, and said: 

“Well, I don’t know what your views about marriage are.  Mine, I may say, are liberal.”

I listened without attempting to reply.

“I think nine-tenths of the trouble that attends married life—­the breakdowns and what not—­come of an irrational effort to tighten the marriage knot.”

Still I said nothing.

“To imagine that two independent human beings can be tied together like a couple of Siamese twins, neither to move without the other, living precisely the same life, year in, year out . . . why, it’s silly, positively silly.”

In my ignorance I could find nothing to say, and after another moment my intended husband swished the loosened gravel with his stick and said: 

“I believe in married people leaving each other free—­each going his and her own way—­what do you think?”

I must have stammered some kind of answer—­I don’t know what—­for I remember that he said next: