“The Duchess and I,” he said, “are going to play Lord Redford and Mrs. Arbuthnot.  Won’t you walk round with us?  The links are really very pretty.”

“Thanks, I hate watching golf,” she answered, rising and shaking out her skirt.  “Hester and I will walk home.”

“Do take the car, Mrs. Mannering,” Berenice said.  “It will simply be waiting here doing nothing.”

“Thank you,” Blanche answered.  “I shall enjoy the walk.”

The foursome was played in very leisurely fashion.  There was plenty of time for conversation.

“I don’t quite understand your wife,” Berenice said to Mannering.  “Her dislike of me is a little too obvious.  What does it mean?  Do you know?”

He shook his head.  He was looking very pale and tired.

“I am not sure that I know anything about it at all,” he said.  “I am beginning to distrust my own judgment.”

“Your marriage—­” she began, thoughtfully.

“Don’t let us talk about it,” he interrupted.  “I tried to pay a debt.  It seems to me that I have only incurred a fresh one.”

They were silent for some time.  Then their opponents lost a ball and displayed no particular diligence in attempting to find it.  Berenice sat down upon a plank seat.

“Your marriage,” she said, “seemed always to me a piece of quixotism.  I never altogether understood it.”

“It was an affair of impulse,” he said, slowly.  “Life from a personal point of view had lost all interest to me.  I did not dream after my—­shall we call it apostacy?—­that I could rely upon even a modicum of your friendship.  I looked upon myself as an outcast commencing life afresh.  Then chance intervened.  I thought I saw my way to making some atonement to a woman whose life I had certainly helped to ruin.  That was where the serious part of the mistake came.  I thought what I had to offer would be sufficient.  I am beginning now to doubt it.”

“And what are you going to do?” she asked, looking steadily away from him.

“Heaven knows,” he answered, bitterly.  “I cannot give what I do not possess.”

Was it his fancy, or was there a gleam of satisfaction about her still, pale face?  He went on.

“I don’t want to play the hypocrite.  On the other hand I don’t want all that I have done to go for nothing.  Can you advise me?”

“No, nor any one else,” she answered, softly.

“Yet I can perhaps correct a little your point of view.  I think that you overestimate your indebtedness to the woman whom you have made your wife.  Her husband was a weak, dissipated creature and he was a doomed man long before that unfortunate day.  It is even very questionable whether that scene in which you figured had anything whatever to do in hastening his death.  That is a good many years ago, and ever since then you seem to have impoverished yourself to find her the means to live in luxury.  I consider that you paid your debt over and over again, and that your final act of self-abnegation was entirely uncalled for.  What more she wants from you I do not know.  Perhaps I can imagine.”