“I wish you had,” said Kent. “Let us have just one rubber before I go. There is time.” But Kent walked home that night with a new trouble at his heart that kept him awake a great part of the night. Meanwhile Clytie was not enjoying herself at Durdleham. At first there were eager embraces, trifling tendernesses and solicitudes. The dear prodigal had returned, but the fatted calf was killed discreetly, lest it should convey a husk-flavoured reproach. Grace and Janet bubbled over with light Durdleham gossip, seeking to interest, and Clytie earnestly and sympathetically sought to be in touch with her surroundings. It was a real heartfelt effort on both sides towards harmony. But it soon became patent that these efforts were unavailing. Clytie saw the old prejudices barring her at every turn. She recognised with the bitterness of disillusionment that she was the bit of grit in the family machinery, stopping the smoothness of its working. As long as she identified herself with Durdleham interests things went well; but as soon as she, in her turn, ventured to sketch the bright incidents in her town life she felt a check in the current of mutual sympathy. If she was reserved, her sisters complained. They ought to know something of her friends, her occupations. When she was expansive they shrank cold and crablike into their mail of prejudice. Her intimacy with a strange Bohemian man was a thorn in the side of the family. Mr. Davenant considered it extremely injudicious, and Mrs. Blather whispered to him that she scarcely thought it moral. Janet was too horrified to allude directly to the circumstance. But, in her neat, prim bedchamber, she prayed to the Almighty to lead her erring sister out of the paths of temptation. She duly informed Clytie of this act of piety, and when Clytie burst into laughter that was nearer to tears than to merriment, left the room in virtuous indignation. Clytie could not help confessing to herself that she longed for Kent's companionship, with its broader sympathies and inspiring influences, but the view the household took of it pained her with a sense of aching discomfort, and made her feel a strange diffidence in writing to him as she had promised. She at last addressed him a short little note, stiff and constrained, which reached him the morning after his conversation with Wither and did not help to cheer him. Too proud to wait for an opportunity of posting this letter herself, she placed it on the hall slab together with the rest of the outgoing correspondence of the family. Although a hundred letters might have lain there for post without any one of them attracting Mrs. Blather's attention,--she was too pure-minded a gentlewoman for idle curiosity to be one of her failings,--it was too good an opportunity for the imps who seem sometimes to regulate human affairs to let slip, and as a matter of course Mrs. Blather's eye fell upon the address.