“Oh no, my dear, why shouldn’t he? Oh, of course old Mr. Cloud used to go up two or three times a week. His hobby—there was no real necessity. Besides, it’s been a company for years now. Mrs. Gedge told me so. Mrs. Gedge has shares. And Mrs. Cloud has money of her own as well. What should Justin Cloud go to business for?” What indeed? Laura was only too pleased to find that Justin would have time on his hands. Firmly she suppressed the conviction of her industrious forebears, the inherited conviction that a man who did not begin work at nine in the morning and return worn out at half-past six, was somehow cheating the universe. And, since there was no need for Justin to work, set herself to help him to play. But there again they differed. They had talked about Architecture in the Italian play-ground, about Botticelli, and Carpaccio, and Dante, and Excavations, and Francis of Assisi, and Giotto, and so on steadily through the alphabet to Virgil and Zenobius. And vaguely, without actually canvassing the matter, she expected to go on thinking and talking to Justin about these entirely satisfactory and absorbing subjects for the rest of their natural lives. But she had reckoned without Justin, without old habits, and a flying visit to Bellew, and an enlarged but by no means completed collection crying out for attention. Art?—when nests were tucked away in the Brackenhurst hedges and nests swinging high in the Brackenhurst woods and birds rising from every tussock of green heather on flat-topped Brackenhurst Hill to mislead the enemy? Art? Art was in Italy, or if she must cross Europe with them at Laura’s invitation, Justin, like a sensible Briton, insisted on finding her lodgings in town. And there they had left her, the foreigner, the bored great lady, to yawn away her days in Chelsea attics and overheated galleries. Of course they promised to come and look her up constantly: and Laura meant, and Justin thought he meant, to keep that promise. But the train service from Brackenhurst was a slow one: and the weather was perfect. Besides—didn’t Laura understand?—he _enjoyed_ pottering round the fields with a collecting-box. But after Botticelli—birds’ eggs?