“Oh yes—­I like him.”

“That’s all right.  And really, I don’t wonder that people can’t make him out.  He’s the strangest animal I ever met in my life.  I haven’t made him out yet.  I think I shall give him up.”

“Give him up, by all means.  Isn’t that what people generally do when they can’t understand each other?”

Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer.  She was trying to think, and thinking came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

“I suppose he’s had a past.  But of course it doesn’t do to go poking and probing into a man’s past—­”

Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman.  She was sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some familiar spirit.  “And yet I wish—­no, I don’t wish I knew.  I know he must have had an awful time of it.”  She turned her face suddenly on Stanistreet.  “What do you think he told me the other day?  He said he had never known anybody who wasn’t either a fool or a sinner.  What do you think of that?  Must you be one or the other?”

Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders.  “You may be both.  We are all of us sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools.”

“I wonder.  He isn’t a fool.”

Stanistreet wondered too.  He wondered at the things she allowed herself to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all, he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.

In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was waving her muff wildly in the air.  “Look—­there he goes!  Oh, did you see him take that fence?  What an insane thing to do with the ground like that.”

He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.

“By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy’s guns at the head of a line of cavalry.”

“Yes.”  She leaned back; the excitement faded from her face, and she sighed.  The sigh was so light that it scarcely troubled the frosty air, but it made Stanistreet look at her again.  How adorably pretty she was in all her moods!

Perhaps she was conscious of the look, for she rattled on again more incoherently than before.  “I’m talking a great deal of nonsense; I always do when I get the chance.  You can’t talk nonsense to mother; she wouldn’t understand it.  She’d think it was sense.  And, you see, I’m interested in my husband.  I suppose it’s the proper thing to take an interest in your husband.  If you won’t take an interest in your husband, what will you take an interest in?  It’s natural—­not to say primitive.  Do you know, he says I’m the most primitive person he ever came across.  Should you say I was primitive?  Don’t answer that.  I don’t think he’d like me to talk about him quite so much.  He thinks I never know where to draw the line.  But I never see any lines to draw, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to draw them.”