He pressed his hand on hers.

“I shall soon come back.  And soon you shall come with me there.”

“I love this place,” she said.  “Are there any letters for me?”

He untied the string of the packet, looked over the contents, and handed her three or four.

“And now run away and read yours,” she said.  “When you’re in my room I can do nothing.  You take up all my attention.  I’ll come down in a few minutes.”

He gave her a kiss and obeyed her.

When he was in the little drawing-room, he threw the papers carelessly on a table without taking off their wrappers.  He had scarcely looked at a paper since he had been in Egypt; he had had other things to do, things that had engrossed him mind and body.  Like many men who are informed by a vital enthusiasm, Nigel sometimes lived for a time in blinkers, which shut out from his view completely the world to right and left of him.  He could be an almost terribly concentrated man.  And since he had been in Egypt he had been concentrated on his wife, and on his own life in relation to her.  The affairs of the nations had not troubled him.  He had read his letters, and little besides.  Now he took those which had come that morning, and went out upon the terrace to run through them in the sunshine.

Bills, a communication from his agent at Etchingham, a note from his man of affairs in Cairo, and—­hullo!—­a letter from his brother, Harwich!

That did not promise him much pleasure.  Already he had received several family letters scarcely rejoicing in his marriage.  They had not bothered him as much as he had formerly feared they would.  He did not expect his relations, or the world, to look at things with his eyes, to think of Ruby with gentleness or even forgiveness for her past.  He knew his world too well to make preposterous mental demands upon it.  But Harwich had already expressed himself with his usual freedom.  There seemed no particular reason why he should write so soon again.

Nigel tore open the letter, read it quickly, re-read it, then laid it down upon his knees, pulled his linen hat over his eyes, and sat for a long while quite motionless, thinking.

His brother’s letter informed him that his sister-in-law, Zoe, Harwich’s wife, had given birth to twin children—­sons—­and that they were “stunningly well—­hip, hip, hooray!”

Harwich’s boisterous joy was very natural, and might be supposed to spring from paternal feelings that did him honour, but there was a note of triumph in his exultation which Nigel understood, and which made him thoughtful now.  Harwich was glorying in the fact that Nigel and Nigel’s wife were cut out of the succession—­that, so far as one could see, Mrs. Armine would now never be Lady Harwich.

For himself Nigel did not care at all.  Harwich was ten years older than he was, but he had never thought about succeeding him, had never wished to succeed him, and when he had married Ruby he had known that his sister-in-law was going to have a child.  He had known this, but he had not told it to Ruby.  He had not concealed it; simply, it had not occurred to him to tell her.  Now the tone of Harwich’s letter was making him wonder, “Will she mind?”