So he had not gone with the men.  How horrid!  And what a nuisance that he should find her here!  Well, she was not going to put herself out for him.  She lowered her pen softly, and began to scratch the paper, over which she bent absorbedly.  He turned round.  “Oh, I beg your pardon—­”

“Oh, it’s you, Claud!  Good morning!  Why, I thought you would be out with the guns this fine day.”

“Fine day, do you call it?  There’s a wind like a knife.  And you sit here with the window wide open—­”

He marched towards it, and shut it with violence.  It was a great glass door between stone mullions.  Above it and two fellow-sheets of glittering transparency, three coats of many quarterings enriched the colour-scheme of the stately room.  She watched him with the beginning of a smile upon her lips.  The humour of the situation appealed to her.

“I like an open window,” she remarked mildly.  “If you remember, I always did.”

He came towards her, looking at her gloomily, looking himself thin and grey and shivery—­but always like a prince.

“You have more flesh to keep you warm than I have,” said he, quite roughly.

“Thank you!” She bridled and flushed.  Her massive figure, for a woman of her years, was perfect; but of course she was as sensitive as the well-proportioned female always is to the suspicion that she was too fat.  “You have not lost the art of paying graceful compliments.”

“I meant it for one,” said he, replying to her scoffing tone.  “You put me to shame, Deb, with your vigour and youthfulness.  I know how old you are, and you don’t look it by ten years.  And you are a beauty still, let me tell you.  It may not be a graceful compliment, but at least it is sincere.  Even these girls here—­”

“Nonsense about beauty—­at my time of life,” she broke in; but she smiled behind her frown, and forgave him his remark about her flesh.  “You and I are too old to talk that sort of stuff now.”

“Do you think I am so very old?” he asked her, standing before her writing-table, as if inviting a serious judgment.

She glanced quickly over him.  His moustache was white, his ivory-tinted face scratched with fine lines about the eyes; he stooped at the shoulders, and his chest had hollowed in.  Yet she could have returned his compliment and called him a beauty still.  He was so to her.  Every line and movement of his body had a distinction all his own, and “What a shame it is,” she thought, “for that profile to crumble away before it has been carved in marble.”

“We are in the same boat,” she answered him.  “There are not five years between us.”

“Five years put us out of the same boat,” he rejoined, “especially when they are virtually fifteen.  Deb, I know you think me an old man—­don’t you?”

“What I think is that you are a sick man,” she said kindly.  “Are you, Claud?  You used to be so strong, for all your slenderness.  What is the matter with you?”