“Best love, dear, from your. 
          
                                   “Babs.”

The same afternoon she came, but without Miltoun, driving up from the station in a fly.  Lord Dennis met her at the gate; and, having kissed her, looked at her somewhat anxiously, caressing his white peaked beard.  He had never yet known Babs sick of anything, except when he took her out in John Bogle’s boat.  She was certainly looking pale, and her hair was done differently—­a fact disturbing to one who did not discover it.  Slipping his arm through hers he led her out into a meadow still full of buttercups, where an old white pony, who had carried her in the Row twelve years ago, came up to them and rubbed his muzzle against her waist.  And suddenly there rose in Lord Dennis the thoroughly discomforting and strange suspicion that, though the child was not going to cry, she wanted time to get over the feeling that she was.  Without appearing to separate himself from her, he walked to the wall at the end of the field, and stood looking at the sea.

The tide was nearly up; the South wind driving over it brought him the scent of the sea-flowers, and the crisp rustle of little waves swimming almost to his feet.  Far out, where the sunlight fell, the smiling waters lay white and mysterious in July haze, giving him a queer feeling.  But Lord Dennis, though he had his moments of poetic sentiment, was on the whole quite able to keep the sea in its proper place—­for after all it was the English Channel; and like a good Englishman he recognized that if you once let things get away from their names, they ceased to be facts, and if they ceased to be facts, they became—­the devil!  In truth he was not thinking much of the sea, but of Barbara.  It was plain that she was in trouble of some kind.  And the notion that Babs could find trouble in life was extraordinarily queer; for he felt, subconsciously, what a great driving force of disturbance was necessary to penetrate the hundred folds of the luxurious cloak enwrapping one so young and fortunate.  It was not Death; therefore it must be Love; and he thought at once of that fellow with the red moustaches.  Ideas were all very well—­no one would object to as many as you liked, in their proper place—­the dinner-table, for example.  But to fall in love, if indeed it were so, with a man who not only had ideas, but an inclination to live up to them, and on them, and on nothing else, seemed to Lord Dennis ‘outre’.

She had followed him to the wall, and he looked—­at her dubiously.

“To rest in the waters of Lethe, Babs?  By the way, seen anything of our friend Mr. Courtier?  Very picturesque—­that Quixotic theory of life!”

And in saying that, his voice (like so many refined voices which have turned their backs on speculation) was triple-toned-mocking at ideas, mocking at itself for mocking at ideas, yet showing plainly that at bottom it only mocked at itself for mocking at ideas, because it would be, as it were, crude not to do so.