“So that is why you are living down here like this?” she murmured.

“Precisely!  The one thing for which I am grateful,” he went on, “is that I always refused to let my wife take a big country house.  I insisted upon an unpretentious place for the times when I could rest.  I think that I shall settle down here altogether.  I can just afford to live here if I shoot plenty of rabbits, and if Robert’s rheumatism is not too bad for him to look after the vegetable garden.”

“Of course you are talking nonsense,” she pronounced, a little curtly.

“Why nonsense?”

“You must go back to your work,” she insisted.

“Keep this place for your holiday moments, certainly, but for the rest, to talk of settling down here is simply wicked.”

“What is my work?” he asked.  “I tell you frankly that I do not know where I belong.  A very intelligent constituency, stuffed up to the throat with schoolboard education, has determined that it would prefer a representative who has changed his politics already four times.  I seem to be nobody’s man.  Horlock at heart is frightened of me, because he is convinced that I am not sound, and he has only tried to make use of me as a sop to democracy.  The Whigs hate me like poison, hate me even worse than Horlock.  If I were in Parliament, I should not know which Party to support.  I think I shall devote my time to roses.”

“And between September and May?”

“I shall hibernate and think about them.”

“Of course,” she said, with the air of one humoring a child, “you are not in earnest.  You have just been through a very painful experience and you are suffering from it.  As for the rest, you are talking nonsense.”

“Explain, please,” he begged.

“You said just now that you did not know where your place was,” she continued.  “You called yourself nobody’s man.  Why, the most ignorant person who thinks about things could tell you where you belong.  Even I could tell you.”

“Please do,” he invited.

She rose to her feet.

“Walk round the garden with me,” she begged, brushing the cigarette ash from her skirt.  “You know what a terrible out-of-door person I am.  This room seems to me close.  I want to smell the sea from one of those wonderful lookouts of yours.”

He walked with her along one of the lower paths, deliberately avoiding the upper lookouts.  They came presently to a grass-grown pier.  She stood at the end, her firm, capable fingers clenching the stone wall, her eyes looking seaward.

“I will tell you where you belong,” she said.  “In your heart you must know it, but you are suffering from that reaction which comes from failure to those people who are not used to failure.  You belong to the head of things.  You should hold up your right, hand, and the party you should lead should form itself about you.  No, don’t interrupt me,” she went on.  “You and all of us know that the country is in a bad way.