“She is not my secretary,” he explained.  “She came in place of her brother, who met with a slight accident just as he was starting.”

Somehow or other, he fancied that Elisabeth was pleased.

“I didn’t think that it was like you to have a woman secretary,” she remarked.

He smiled as he replied: 

“Miss Thurnbrein is a very earnest worker and a real humanitarian.  She has written articles about woman labour in London.”

“Julia Thurnbrein!” Elisabeth exclaimed.  “Yes, I have read them.  If only I had known that that was she!  I should have liked so much to have talked to her.  Do you think that she would come and see me, or let me come and see her?  We really do want to understand these things, and it seems to me, somehow, that people like Julia Thurnbrein, and all those who really understand, keep away from us wilfully.  They won’t exchange thoughts.  They believe that we are their natural enemies.  And we aren’t, you know.  There isn’t any one I’d like to meet and talk with so much as Julia Thurnbrein.”

He nodded sympathetically.

“They are prejudiced,” he admitted.  “All of them are disgusted with me for being down here.  They look with grave suspicion upon my ability to wear a dress suit.  It is just that narrowness which has set back the clock a hundred years. . . .  How I like your idea of an open-air drawing-room!  Mr. Foley hasn’t been looking for me, has he?  I am due in his study in three minutes.”

Her finger touched his arm.

“Come with me for one moment,” she insisted, a little abruptly.

She led him down one of the walks—­a narrow turf path, leading through great clumps of rhododendrons.  At the bottom was the wood where the nightingale had his home.  After a few paces she stopped.

“Mr. Maraton,” she said, “this may be our last serious word together, for when you have talked with my uncle you will have made your decision.  Look at me, please.”

He looked at her.  Just then the nightingale began to sing again, and curiously enough it seemed to him that a different note had crept into the bird’s song.  It was a cry for life, an absolutely pagan note, which came to him through the velvety darkness.

“Isn’t it your theory,” she whispered, “to destroy for the sake of the future?  Don’t do it.  Theory sometimes sounds so sublime, but the present is actually here.  Be content to work piecemeal, to creep upwards inch by inch.  Life is something, you know.  Life is something for all of us.  No man has the right to destroy it for others.  He has not even the right to destroy it for himself.”

Maraton was suddenly almost giddy.  For a moment he had relaxed and that moment was illuminating.  Perhaps she saw the fire which leapt into his eyes.  If she did, she never quailed.  Her head was within a few inches of his, his arms almost touching her.  She saw but she never moved.  If anything, she drew a little nearer.