“The girls,” Isabel Penny said, “will be gallopading now.  Myrtle has a new dress, her father gave it to her, an apricot mantua.”

“He’s really idiotic about Myrtle,” Howat declared irritably.  His mother glanced swiftly at him.  She made no comment.  “Now Caroline!  It’s Caroline who ought to marry David Forsythe.”

“Such things must fall out as they will.”

God, that was true enough, terribly true!  He rose and strode into the farther darkness of the drawing room, returning to the fireplace, marching away again.  He saw the white glimmer of Ludowika’s arms; he had a vision of her tying the broad ribbon about her rounded, silken knee. “... a man now,” his mother’s voice was distant, blurred.  “Responsibilities; your father—­” He had heard this before without being moved; but suddenly the words had a new actuality; he was a man now, that was to say he stood finally, irrevocably, alone, beyond assistance, advice.  He had never heeded them; he had gone a high-handed, independent way, but the others had been there; unconsciously he had been aware of them, even counted on them.  Now they had vanished.

Caroline and Myrtle, bringing David with them again, returned on the following morning.  It seemed to Howat that the former was almost lovely; she had a gayer sparkle, a clearer colour, than he had ever seen her possess before.  On the other hand, Myrtle was dull; the dress, it seemed, had not been the unqualified success she had hoped for.  Something newer had arrived in the meantime from London.  Ludowika, it developed, had one of the later sacques in her boxes; but that, she said indifferently, must be quite dead now.  It seemed to Howat that she too regarded Myrtle without enthusiasm.  Ludowika and Myrtle had had very little to say to each other; Myrtle studied Mrs. Winscombe’s apparel with a keen, even belligerent, eye; the other patronized the girl in a species of half absent instruction.

The sky was flawless, leaden blue; the sunlight fell in an enveloping flood over the countryside, but it was pale, without warmth.  There was no wind, not a leaf turned on the trees—­a sinuous sheeting of the country-side like red-gold armour.  But Howat knew that at the first stir of air the leaves would be in stricken flight, the autumn accomplished.  Caroline dragged him impetuously down into the garden, among the brown, varnished stems of the withered roses, the sere, dead ranks of scarlet sage.  “He hugged me,” she told him; “I was quite breathless.  It was in a hall, dark; but he didn’t say anything.  What do you think?” There was nothing definite that he might express; and he patted her shoulder.  He had a new kinship with Caroline; Howat now understood her tempest of feeling, concealed beneath her commonplace daily aspect.