“Twenty invitations in a week,” reflected Tolly’s master, “the first-fruits of my rise in life! they used to average six a week. I’ll go and see Lady Mary. Damn it all, why need a man lie to himself, I’ll go and see Miss Waring!” And he went, and somehow the next day he went again, and the next, and the next after that. Then he and Gwen discovered a mutual passion for riding, not up and down the Row, that seemed as tame a pastime to the one as to the other, but in the early mornings out on the heath at Hampstead, or sometimes far out on the Surrey side. Once they went as far as Surbiton, where they got drenched in a shower and had to take refuge and have tea in an old inn. But it is not at all to be supposed that with all this intimacy those two got an inch nearer one another, they were intellectual companions, nothing more, not even to be called comrades. Gwen neither evaded nor shirked conventions, she simply swept them aside, as she did her lovers. As for Strange, he felt her and the rides very distinctly a boon. She was an excellent flint to make sparks with, her ways of thought were so new, let alone startling, her modes of expression so quaint, her tongue so remarkably sharp, and she had such a brutal habit of speaking undiluted truths. For the once the two agreed, they disagreed at least three times, and a good pitched battle had to be fought to settle any question. The sponge was never by any chance thrown up, it was forced out of the hand of one or of the other of them. It was a most bracing and delightful experience for Gwen, it was so satisfactory and so absolutely free from mawkishness, and she reflected, with superb self-congratulation, that the man had just as little capacity for that phase as herself. “She’s hard—hard as nails,” he reflected after an evening at Lady Mary’s, “and yet, she wasn’t made like that, I could swear. I wonder what the devil’s wrong with her eyes, and what’ll put them right? I believe, upon my word I do, that a baby might do the business for her. There’s not a man living that would have any effect upon them, and yet there are fellows going who would take that dewiness, for softness, hang it! it’s mere moisture, but—ah, well, the effect is magnificent!” He took out his watch, but his hand shook so that he could not open it. “God forgive me!” he muttered, “this is awful! I have had a good deal in the way of education at women’s hands, but this is a new experience,” he remarked after a pause, grinning, and flicking a spot of ash off his coat, “her want of self-consciousness is next to ghastly, it has an uncanny sexless sort of air about it that gives one the shivers.” The intellectual companionship continued unabated for ten more days, then one evening at the end of June, Gwen Waring told Strange that she and Lady Mary were going down into the country early in July.