And he stood looking at Noel, intensely puzzled, suspecting nothing of the hard fact which was altering her—­vaguely jealous, anxious, pained.  And when she had gone up to bed, he roamed up and down the room a long time, thinking.  He longed for a friend to confide in, and consult; but he knew no one.  He shrank from them all, as too downright, bluff, and active; too worldly and unaesthetic; or too stiff and narrow.  Amongst the younger men in his profession he was often aware of faces which attracted him, but one could not confide deep personal questions to men half one’s age.  But of his own generation, or his elders, he knew not one to whom he could have gone.

VIII

Leila was deep in her new draught of life.  When she fell in love it had always been over head and ears, and so far her passion had always burnt itself out before that of her partner.  This had been, of course, a great advantage to her.  Not that Leila had ever expected her passions to burn themselves out.  When she fell in love she had always thought it was for always.  This time she was sure it was, surer than she had ever been.  Jimmy Fort seemed to her the man she had been looking for all her life.  He was not so good-looking as either Farie or Lynch, but beside him these others seemed to her now almost ridiculous.  Indeed they did not figure at all, they shrank, they withered, they were husks, together with the others for whom she had known passing weaknesses.  There was only one man in the world for her now, and would be for evermore.  She did not idealise him either, it was more serious than that; she was thrilled by his voice, and his touch, she dreamed of him, longed for him when he was not with her.  She worried, too, for she was perfectly aware that he was not half as fond of her as she was of him.  Such a new experience puzzled her, kept her instincts painfully on the alert.  It was perhaps just this uncertainty about his affection which made him seem more precious than any of the others.  But there was ever the other reason, too-consciousness that Time was after her, and this her last grand passion.  She watched him as a mother-cat watches her kitten, without seeming to, of course, for she had much experience.  She had begun to have a curious secret jealousy of Noel though why she could not have said.  It was perhaps merely incidental to her age, or sprang from that vague resemblance between her and one who outrivalled even what she had been as a girl; or from the occasional allusions Fort made to what he called “that little fairy princess.”  Something intangible, instinctive, gave her that jealousy.  Until the death of her young cousin’s lover she had felt safe, for she knew that Jimmy Fort would not hanker after another man’s property; had he not proved that in old days, with herself, by running away from her?  And she had often regretted having told him of Cyril Morland’s death.  One day she determined to repair that error.  It was at the Zoo, where they often went on Sunday afternoons.  They were standing before a creature called the meercat, which reminded them both of old days on the veldt.  Without turning her head she said, as if to the little animal:  “Do you know that your fairy princess, as you call her, is going to have what is known as a war-baby?”