"I must trot off," Gilbert said suddenly, going towards the door. "I'm keeping you!..." He paused with his fingers on the handle of the door. "I say, Quinny," he said, "do you know anything about women?" "No, not much," Henry answered. "Do you?" "No. Funny, isn't it?" he replied, and then he went out of the room. Henry sat still for a moment, staring at the closed door, and then turned back to the writing-table and took the letter to Sheila from beneath the blotting-paper. He read it through and sat staring at it until the writing became a dancing blur.... He got up, carrying the letter in his hand, and went to the door and opened it. He tried to call "Gilbert!" but the name came out in a whisper, and before he could call again, he heard the noise of laughter and then the sound of a young voice singing. Mary was downstairs, teasing Ninian. He could hear Ninian, half laughing, half growling, as he shouted, "Don't be an old ass, Mary!" He shut the door and went back to the writing-table, still holding the letter in his hand, and while he stood there, a gong was sounded in the hall. "Lord!" he said, "I shall have to hurry!" and he tore up the letter and put it in the waste-paper basket. 8 They passed their time in bathing and boating and walking, and sometimes Mary was with them, but mostly she was not. They went out in the mornings, soon after breakfast, taking food with them, and seldom returned until the evening. They took long tramps to Honiton and Lyme Regis and Sidmouth, and once they walked to Exeter and returned home by train. Mary liked boating and bathing, but she did not care for walking, and the distances they travelled were beyond her strength; and so it came about that gradually, during Henry's stay at Boveyhayne, she ceased to take part in their outings. It seemed odd to him that she did not make any reference to their love-making. She called him "Quinny" and was friendly enough, but she called Gilbert by his Christian name and was as friendly with him as she was with Henry. He felt hurt when he thought of her indifference to him. "You'd think she'd forgotten about it!" he said to himself one evening when he was sitting alone with her in the garden, and he oscillated between the desire to ignore her and the desire to have it out with her; but he dallied so long between one desire and the other that Gilbert and Ninian and Mrs. Graham had joined them before he had made a decision. He could not understand Mary. She seemed to have grown shy and quiet and much less demonstrative than she had been when he first knew her. "Mary's growing up," Mrs. Graham said to him one evening, irrelevantly; and of course she was, but she had not grown up so much that there should be all this difference between Mary now and Mary then. "Oh, well!" he generally concluded when his thoughts turned to her, "she's only a kid!"