‘He is married, is he not?’

‘Was.’

Victor’s brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.

‘Is he not a soldier?’ she said.

‘Soldiers and parsons!’ Victor interjected.

Now she saw.  She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby’s hovering offer of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling Bethesda.

But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming:  ’It’s only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!’

‘The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,’ said Victor.

She put out her hand to be taken.  ’Not if you back me here.  It really is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow.  And if I’m to be a widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you.  I love adventure, danger;—­well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in a storm.  And if the worst happens, we go down together.  It ’s the detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of fighting.’

‘Say, brandy.’

‘Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?’

’Colney may call it what he pleases.  If I read fiction, let it be fiction; airier than hard fact.  If I see a ballet, my troop of short skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen.  I can’t read dull analytical stuff or “stylists” when I want action—­if I’m to give my mind to a story.  I can supply the reflections.  I’m English—­if Colney ’s right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of supernaturalism.

I don’t ask for bloodshed:  that’s what his “brandy” means.’

’But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it where there’s love; it’s part of the balance, and justifies one’s excitement.  How otherwise do you get any real crisis?  I must read and live something unlike this flat life around us.’

’There’s the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says.  Pass it in books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our thoughts.  No brandy there!  And no fine name for personal predilections or things done in domino!’ Victor said, with his very pleasant face, pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion:  thinking involuntarily of the other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage despite—­or with that poor kind of—­trust in her captain.  But the thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons.  ’This is one that I could trust, as captain or mate,’ he pressed the hand again before dropping it.

’You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at the trial,’ said Lady Grace.

Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of trains and husbands.