"We needn't start until four, mother," she heard him say. "But I'm afraid it is clearing."

Honoria turned from the window.

"Yes, it is clearing," she remarked, "incontestably clearing! You won't escape the Grimshott function after all."

"It's a nuisance having to go," Richard replied. "But you see this is an old engagement. People are wonderfully civil and kind. I wish they were less so. They waste one's time. But it doesn't do to be ungracious, and we needn't stay more than half an hour, need we, mother?"

He looked up at Honoria.

"Don't you think, on the whole, you'd better come too?" he said.

But the young lady shook her head smilingly. She stood close beside Lady Calmady.

"Oh dear, no," she answered. "I am quite absolutely certain I hadn't better come too."

Richard continued to look up at her.

"Half the county will be there. Everything will be richly, comprehensively dull. Think of it. Do come," he repeated, "it would be so good for your soul."

"Oh, my soul's in the humour to be n.o.bly careless of personal advantage," Honoria replied. "It's in a state of almost perilously full-blown optimism regarding the security of its own salvation to-day, somehow."--Her glance rested very sweetly upon Lady Calmady.--"And then all the rest of me--and not impossibly my soul has a word to say in that connection too--cries out to go and tramp over the steaming turf and breathe the scent of the fir woods again."

Honoria sat down lazily on the arm of a neighbouring easy-chair, against the crimson cover of which her striped blue-and-white, shirting dress showed excellently distinct and clear. Richard's prolonged and quiet scrutiny oppressed her slightly, necessitating change of att.i.tude and place.

"And then," she continued, "I want to go down to the paddocks and have a look at the yearlings. How are they coming on? Have you anything good?"

"Two or three promising fillies. They're in the paddock nearest the Long Water. You'll find them as quiet as sheep. But I'll ask you not to go in among the brood-mares and foals unless Chifney is with you. They may be a bit savage and shy, and it is not altogether safe for a lady."

He stretched out his hand, taking Lady Calmady's hand for a moment.

"Dear mother, you look tired. You'll have to put up with Grimshott. The weather's not going to let us off. Go and rest till we start."

And when, a few minutes later, Katharine, departing, closed the door behind her, he addressed Miss St. Quentin again.

"How do you think my mother is?"

"Beautifully well."

"Not worried?"

"No," Honoria said.

"You are really quite contented about her, then?"

The question both surprised and touched his hearer as a friendly and gracious admission that she possessed certain rights.

"Oh dear, yes," she said. "I am more than contented about her. No one can fail to be so who, loving her, sees her now. There was just one thing she wanted. Now she has it, and so all is well."

"What one thing?" d.i.c.kie asked, with a hint of irony in his manner and his voice.

"Why, you--you, Richard," Honoria said.

She drew herself up proudly, a little alarmed by, a little defiant of, the directness of her own speech, perceiving, so soon as she had uttered it, that it might be construed as indirect reproach. And to administer reproach had been very far from her purpose. She fixed her eyes upon the domes of the great oaks, crowning an outstanding knoll at the far end of the lime avenue. The foliage of them, deep green shading to russet, was arrestingly solid and metallic, offering a rather magnificent scheme of stormy colour taken in connection with the hot purple of the uprolling cloud. Framed by the stone work of the open window, the whole presented a fine picture in the manner of Salvator Rosa. A few, bright raindrops splashed and splattered, and the thunder growled far away in the north. The atmosphere was heavy. For a time neither spoke. Then Honoria said, gently, as one asking a favour:--

"Richard, will you tell me about that home of yours? Cousin Katherine was speaking of it to me last night."

And it seemed to her his thought must have journeyed to some far distance, and found difficulty in returning thence, it was so long before he answered her, while his face had become set, and showed colourless as wax against the surrounding crimson of the room.

"Oh, the home!" he exclaimed, shrugging his shoulders just perceptibly.

"It doesn't amount to very much. My mother in her dear unwisdom of faith and hope magnifies the value of it. It's just an idle man's fad."

"A fad with an uncommon amount of backbone to it, apparently."

"That depends on its eventual success. It's a thing to be judged not by intentions but by results."

"What made you think of it?"

Richard looked full at her, spreading out his hands, and again shrugging his shoulders, slightly. Again Miss St. Quentin accused herself of a defect of tact.

"Isn't it rather obvious why I should think of it?" he asked. "It seemed to me that, in a very mild and limited degree, it was calculated to meet a want."--He smiled upon her, quite sweet-temperedly, yet once more there was a flavour of irony in his tone.--"Of course hideous creatures and disabled creatures are an eyesore. We pity, but we look the other way. I quite accept that. They are a nuisance, since they are a standing witness to the fact that things, here below, very far from always work smoothly and well, and that there are disasters beyond the power of applied science to put right. The ordinary human being doesn't covet to be forcibly reminded of that by means of a living object lesson."

Richard shifted his position, clasped his hands behind his head. He had begun speaking without idea of self-revelation, but the relief of speech, after long self-repression, took him, goading him on. Old strains of feeling, kept under by conscious exercise of will, a.s.serted themselves. He asked neither sympathy nor help. He simply called from off those shallows and sand-bars laid bare by the ebbing tide of his first enthusiasm. He protested, wearied by the spiritual dryness which had caused all effort to prove so joyless of late. To have sought relief in words before his mother would have been unpardonable, he held. She had borne enough from him in the past, and more than enough.

But to permit it himself in the presence of this young, strong, capable woman of the world, was very different. She came out of the swing of society and of affairs, of large interests in politics and in thought.

She would go back into those again very shortly, so what did it matter?

She captivated him and incensed him alike. His relation to her had been so fertile of contradictions--at once singularly superficial and fugitive, and singularly vital. He did not care to a.n.a.lyse his own feelings in respect of her. He had, so he told himself, never quite cared to do that. She had wounded his pride shrewdly at times, still he had unquestioning faith in her power of comprehending his meaning as she sat there, graceful, long-limbed, indolent, in her pale dress, looking towards the window, the light on her face revealing the fine squareness of the chiselling of her profile, of her jaw, her nostril, and brow. She appeared so free of spirit, so untrammeled, so excellently exalted above all that is weak, craven, smirched by impurity, capable of baseness and deceit!

"But naturally with me the case is different," he went on, his voice growing deeper, his utterance more measured. "It is futile to resent being reminded of that which, in point of fact, you never forget. It's childish for the pot to call the kettle black. And so I came to the conclusion, a few months ago, to put away all such childishness, and set myself to gain whatever advantage I could from--well--from my own blackness."

Honoria turned her head, averting her face yet further. Richard could only see the outline of her cheek. She had never before heard him make so direct allusion to his own deformity, and it frightened her a little. Her heart beat curiously quick. For it was to her as though he compelled her to draw near and penetrate a region in which, gazing thitherward questioningly from afar, she had divined the residence of stern and intimate miseries, inalienable, unremittent, taking their rise in an almost alarming distance of time and fundamentally of cause.

"You see, in plain English," he said, "I look at all such unhappy beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the out. I belong to them and they to me. It is not an altogether flattering connection. Only recently, I am afraid, have I had the honesty to acknowledge it! But, having once done so, it seems only reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of them, and if possible put them through--not on the lines of a charitable inst.i.tution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical, stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family affection, of personal friendship."

He paused a moment.

"Does that strike you as too unpractical and fantastic, contrary to sound, philanthropic principle and practice?"

Honoria shook her head.

"It is based on a higher law than any of modern organised philanthropy," she said, and her voice had a queer unsteadiness in it.

"It goes back to the Gospels--to the matter of giving your life for your friend."

As she spoke, Honoria rose. She went across and stood at the window.

Furtively she dabbed her pocket handkerchief against her eyes.

"Well, after all, one must give one's life for something or other, you know," d.i.c.kie remarked, "or the days would become a little too intolerably dull, and then one might be tempted to make short work of life altogether."

Honoria returned to her chair and sat down--this time not on the arm of it but in ordinary conventional fashion. She faced Richard. He observed that her eyelids were slightly swollen, slightly red. This gave an extraordinary effect of gentleness to her expression.

"How do you find them--the members of your sad family?" she asked.