“It seems to me, Bambridge, love is rather a let in.” Bambridge cleared his throat sympathetically. “A deuced lot of things are,” he muttered. Annette had always thought Bambridge rather cynical. Time heals wounds, but it leaves scars. Ten years had done a great deal for Horace Lestrange. There was no mark of his great grief left; but although time works very well as a narcotic, it is not stimulating; it had not renewed Horace’s youth. He did not think of love now; he thought of marriage--comfortable, consoling marriage. The girl who had suggested this idea to him was a thoroughly nice girl, pretty, well-educated, and kind-hearted. She had been very good to Horace; they had rowed on the lake together, and her ways were energetic without hardness, and swift with grace. They had climbed some of the surrounding peaks side by side, and she had shown admirable characteristics--quietness, pluck, instantaneous obedience, and endurance. She was a good companion (she challenged no comparison with Annette, who was helpless, clinging, and thoroughly silly, the kind of woman whom--if she dies soon enough--a man never forgets). Edith’s hair and eyes were dark; she had a full sweet mouth and a round chin. She was quite thirty and she wouldn’t expect romance. . . . The last stone failed to jump four times; perhaps it didn’t agree with Horace that there is a time limit for romance. “It would be an excellent thing for the boy,” said Lestrange, putting his hands in his pockets. “Etta of course is a good woman; clever, plenty of tact, but she is so managing. I never knew such a woman; she sponges one up. She has been everything to the little chap though for the last eight years. I hope he won’t make a fuss at leaving her. I don’t think he will; Edith is good with kids. Well, I’ll go and look her up.” He went to look her up. She was usually easy to discover when Lestrange wanted her. She did not run after him, as a sillier woman would have done, neither did she run away from him, as young girls sometimes run from their lovers, but when he looked for her she was there. She sat under a big ilex tree on the terrace of the hotel garden. It was not easy to remember that it was an hotel, for once it had been an old Italian palace, and something of its ancient dignity remained. The lake lay at its foot, a vast and shimmering expanse of silver and azure. The mountains were half withdrawn into vague shadows; sometimes moonstone and sometimes purple, and when the wind blew aside their thin veil of mist, the sun shone over slopes vivid, luminous and green. Around Edith Walton were huge bushes of camellias, red and white and very splendid. A mad riot of roses flung itself over a pergola. In the distance a magnolia tree slowly opened wonderful flowers to the sun--flowers that seemed like the birth of spiritual treasures, white cloistered buds filled with aromatic fragrance.