“Pull me up, then!  I am much too comfortable to move unaided.”

She sprang to her feet lightly enough, and for a moment he kept her hands, which rested willingly enough in his.  They looked at one another in silence.  Then she laughed.

“My dear Arranmore,” she protested, “I am not made up half carefully enough to stand such a critical survey by daylight.  Your north windows are too terrible.”

“Not to you, dear lady,” he answered, smiling.  “I was wondering whether it was possible that you could be forty-one.”

“You brute,” she exclaimed, with uplifted eyebrows.  “How dare you?  Forty if you like—­for as long as you like.  Forty is the fashionable age, but one year over that is fatal.  Don’t you know that now-a-days a woman goes straight from forty to sixty?  It is such a delicious long rest.  And besides, it gives a woman an object in life which she has probably been groping about for all her days.  One is never bored after forty.”

“And the object?”

“To keep young, of course.  There’s scope for any amount of ingenuity.  Since that dear man in Paris has hit upon the real secret of enamelling, we are thinking of extending the limit to sixty-five.  Lily Cestigan is seventy-one, you know, and she told me only last week that Mat Harlowe—­you know Harlowe, he’s rather a nice boy, in the Guards had asked her to run away with him.  She’s known him three months, and he’s seen her at least three times by daylight.  She’s delighted about it.”

“And is she going?” Arranmore asked.

“Well, I’m not sure that she’d care to risk that,” Lady Caroom answered, thoughtfully.  “She told him she’d think about it, and, meanwhile, he’s just as devoted as ever.”

They crossed the great stone hall together—­the hall which, with its wonderful pillars and carved dome, made Enton the show-house of the county.  Arranmore’s study was a small octagonal room leading out from the library.  A fire of cedar logs was burning in an open grate, and he wheeled up an easy-chair for her close to his writing-table.

“I wonder,” she remarked, thoughtfully, “what you think of Syd Molyneux?”

“Is there anything—­to be thought about him?” he answered, lighting a cigarette.

“He’s rather that way, isn’t he?” she assented.  “I mean for Sybil, you know.”

“I should let Sybil decide,” he answered.

“She probably will,” Lady Caroom said.  “Still, she’s horribly bored at having to be dragged about to places, you know, and that sort of thing, just because she isn’t married, and she likes Syd all right.  He’s no fool!”

“I suppose not,” Arranmore answered.  “He’s of a type, you know, which has sprung up during my—­absence from civilization.  You want to grow up with it to appreciate it properly.  I don’t think he’s good enough for Sybil.”

Lady Caroom sighed.

“Sybil’s a dear girl,” she said, “although she’s a terrible nuisance to me.  I shouldn’t be at all surprised either if she developed views.  I wish you were a marrying man, Arranmore.  I used to think of you myself once, but you would be too old for me now.  You’re exactly the right age for Sybil.”