‘You yourself offer the answer to that,’ she replied.  ’The very fact that you have exerted such power, never mind by what means, puts you in a relation to that man which is anything but idle or foolish.  Isn’t it rather a great and moving thing that one can be a source of such vast blessing to another?  Money is only the accident.  It is the kindness, the human feeling, that has to be considered.  You show what the world might be, if all men were human.  If I could do one act like that, Mr. Egremont, I should cry with gratitude!’

He looked at her, and found the Annabel of his memory.  With the exception of Mrs. Ormonde, he knew no woman who spoke thus from heart and intellect at once.  The fervour of his admiration was rekindled.

‘It is to you one should come for strength,’ he said, ’when the world weighs too heavily.’

Annabel was sober again.

‘Do you often go and see him at his house?’ she asked, speaking of Grail.

’I am going on Friday night.  I have not been since that one occasion which I mentioned in a letter to Mr. Newthorpe.  I had to write to him yesterday about the repair of the house he is going to live in, and in his reply this morning he asked me to come for an hour’s talk.’

’You were curious, father told me, about the wife he had chosen.  Have you seen her yet?’

‘Yes.  She is quite a young girl.’

He was looking at a far-off sail, and as he replied his eyes kept the same direction.  Annabel asked no further question.  Egremont laughed before he spoke again.

’How absurdly one conjectures about unknown people I suppose it was natural to think of Grail marrying someone not quite young and very grave.’

‘But I hope she is grave enough to be his fitting companion?’

He opened his lips, but altered the words he was about to speak.

’I only saw her for a few minutes—­a chance meeting.  She impressed me favourably.’

They walked in a leisurely way for about half an hour, then turned, Mists were creeping westward over Pevensey, and the afternoon air was growing chill.  There was no sound from the sea, which was divided lengthwise into two tracts of different hue, that near the land a pale green, that which spread to the horizon a cold grey.

Nothing passed between them which could recall their last day together, nothing beyond that one exclamation of Egremont’s, which Annabel hardly appeared to notice.  Neither desired to prolong the conversation.  Yet neither had ever more desired heart-sympathy than now.

Annabel said to herself:  ‘It is over.’  She was spared anxious self-searching.  The currents of their lives were slowly but surely carrying them apart from each other.  When she came into the drawing-room to offer tea, her face was brighter, as if she had experienced some relief.