Jane shook her head.

“Sorry, aunt,” she regretted, “but I am dining with the Temperleys.  I met Diana in Bond Street this morning.”

“Thursday, then.”

“I am keeping Thursday for—­a friend.  Saturday I am free.”

“Saturday we are going into the country,” her aunt said, a little ungraciously.  “Heaven knows what for!  Your uncle hates shooting and always catches cold if he gets his feet wet.”

Tallente unwillingly held out his hand to his hostess.  He seemed to have no alternative but to make his adieux.  Jane walked with him towards the door.

“I am horribly disappointed,” he confessed, under his breath.

She smiled a little deprecatingly.

“I couldn’t help having people here, could I?”

“I suppose not,” he answered, with masculine unreasonableness.  “I only know that I wanted to see you alone.”

“Men are such schoolboys,” she murmured tolerantly.  “Even you!  I must see my friends, mustn’t I, when they know that I am here and call?”

“About that friend on Thursday night?” he went on.

“I am waiting to hear from him,” she answered, “whether he prefers to dine here or to take me out.”

His ill-humour vanished, and with it some of his stiffness of bearing.  His farewell bow from the door to Lady Somerham was distinguished with a new affability.

“If we may be alone,” he said softly, “I should like to come here.”

Nevertheless, his visit left him a little disturbed, perhaps a little irritable.  With all the dominant selfishness which is part of a man’s love, he had spent every waking leisure moment since their last meeting in a world peopled by Jane and himself alone, a world in which any other would have been an intruder.  His eagerly anticipated visit to her had brought him sharply up against the commonplace facts of their day-by-day existence.  He began to realise that she was without the liberty accorded to his sex, or to such women as Nora Miall, whose emancipation was complete.  Jane’s way through life was guarded by a hundred irritating conventions.  He began to doubt even whether she realised the full import of what had happened between them.  There was nothing gross about his love, not even a speculation in his mind as to its ultimate conclusion.  He was immersed in a wave of sentimentality.  He wanted her by his side, free from any restraint.  He wanted the joy of her presence, more of those soft, almost reluctant kisses, the mute obedience of her nature to the sweet and natural impulse of her love.  Of the inevitable end of these things he never thought.  He was like a schoolboy in love for the first time.  His desires led him no further than the mystic joy of her presence, the sweet, passionless content of propinquity.  For the time the rest lay somewhere in a world of golden promise.  The sole right that he burned to claim was the right to have her continually by his side