“Fact is,” replied Blaydon, “I’ve an aunt out there who has become vastly interested in painters, in her old age, and I’ve heard her speak of you. A Mrs. Seymour.” “Don’t ask me to remember names back home,” laughed Osprey. “You would think me a pretty determined exile if I told you how long it had been since I was there.” “In any case, she’ll be much excited when I tell her that I have met you,” said the other, reflecting on the humour and difficulty of his situation, in which discretion constrained him with Osprey from telling Moira’s connection to his aunt, and with his aunt from telling Moira’s connection with Osprey. “Mysteries are a damned nuisance among such likeable people,” he concluded to himself. “I hope this one gets cleared up some day.” And his conviction was that it would. XXVI Moira awoke late, long after Potter Osprey had departed for the city, where he was to meet Roget and return with him in the car sometime that night. It was her last week in the cottage. A few days after the departure of Rob Blaydon for the west, Elsie Jennings had paid her a visit and talked. Miles Harlindew was living with a young woman in the Village. There was a rumour of their going to Europe together.... Moira suppressed a twinge at this, in which at first there was more of sardonic humour than of pain. The pain came sharply afterward, but it did not remain long this time, and it left her at last aloof. She no longer felt the vestige of an obstacle to following her own inclinations, and she also had no further defence against Osprey’s attentions. The growth of understanding between them was almost wordless, monosyllabic. It made her intensely happy to discover in his eyes how much she was bringing to him. A long time would have to elapse before she could give a worthy response to that emotion, but she felt that it would come.... The troublesome details of her future were therefore on this morning a matter of no concern to her at all. What filled her with delight was the immediate present. Never had she seen such weather as that October day, or if she had, never before had she been alive to its innumerable aspects at once. After the dubiousness and suffering of the past few weeks she felt both older and younger, both cleansed by experience and ready for more to come. Her whole womanly being was gathering itself for something new, and she meant to grasp it to the full. The ship’s engines were throbbing in her blood and the open sea lay beyond, but her hand was firm on the wheel.... It was a day to idle, one of those days when the children were positively in the way and work impossible. It was a day of heady egoism, of reveling in her securely felt advantages, and a certain sense of having won the spurs of lawlessness. She would be restless until to-morrow when the men came. What fine friends they were!