But once goaded to it, she was astonished to find how suddenly it seemed to readjust their personal relations—­years and experience falling from his shoulders like a cloak which had concealed a man very nearly her own age; years and experience adding themselves to her, and at least an inch to her stature to redress the balance between them.

It had amused him immensely as he realised the subtle change; and it pleased him, too, because no man of thirty-five cares to be treated en grandpere by a girl of nineteen, even if she has not yet worn the polish from her first pair of high-heeled shoes.

“It’s astonishing,” he said, “how little respect infirmity and age command in these days.”

“I do respect you,” she insisted, “especially your infirmity of purpose.  You said you were going to ride by yourself.  But, do you know, I don’t believe you are of a particularly solitary disposition; are you?”

He laughed at first, then suddenly his face fell.

“Not from choice,” he said, under his breath.  Her quick ear heard, and she turned, semi-serious, questioning him with raised eyebrows.

“Nothing; I was just muttering.  I’ve a villainous habit of muttering mushy nothings—­”

“You did say something!”

“No; only ghoulish gabble; the mere murky mouthings of a meagre mind.”

“You did.  It’s rude not to repeat it when I ask you.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Then repeat what you said to yourself.”

“Do you wish me to?” he asked, raising his eyes so gravely that the smile faded from lip and voice when she answered:  “I beg your pardon, Captain Selwyn.  I did not know you were serious.”

“Oh, I’m not,” he returned lightly, “I’m never serious.  No man who soliloquises can be taken seriously.  Don’t you know, Miss Erroll, that the crowning absurdity of all tragedy is the soliloquy?”

Her smile became delightfully uncertain; she did not quite understand him—­though her instinct warned her that, for a second, something had menaced their understanding.

Riding forward with him through the crisp sunshine of mid-December, the word “tragedy” still sounding in her ears, her thoughts reverted naturally to the only tragedy besides her own which had ever come very near to her—­his own.

Could he have meant that?  Did people mention such things after they had happened?  Did they not rather conceal them, hide them deeper and deeper with the aid of time and the kindly years for a burial past all recollection?

Troubled, uncomfortably intent on evading every thought or train of ideas evoked, she put her mount to a gallop.  But thought kept pace with her.

She was, of course, aware of the situation regarding Selwyn’s domestic affairs; she could not very well have been kept long in ignorance of the facts; so Nina had told her carefully, leaving in the young girl’s mind only a bewildered sympathy for man and wife whom a dreadful and incomprehensible catastrophe had overtaken; only an impression of something new and fearsome which she had hitherto been unaware of in the world, and which was to be added to her small but, unhappily, growing list of sad and incredible things.