“I am glad you are not a critic,” he said. She was verging toward the door. “What are you going to do now?” “Afterward—we meant to drive to Hastings House. John thought there would be time. It is quite near Belvedere, you know. But——And I shall not have another free afternoon for a fortnight.” They went out in silence, past the baboo who sat behind a table at the receipt of entrance money, and down the steps. The syce opened the carriage door, and Mrs. Church got in. There was a moment’s pause, while the man looked questioningly at Ancram, still holding open the door. “If he invites himself,” said Judith inwardly, with the intention of self-discipline; and the rest was hope. “Is there any reason——?” he asked, with his foot on the step; and it was quite unnecessary that he should add “against my coming?” “No—there is no reason.” Then she added, with a visible effort to make it the commonplace thing it was not, “Then you will drive out with me, and I shall see the place after all? How nice!” They rolled out into the gold-and-green afternoon life of the Maidan, along wide pipal-shadowed roads, across a bridge, through a lane or two where the pariahs barked after the carriage and the people about the huts stared, shading their eyes. There seemed very little to say. They thought themselves under the spell of the pleasantness of it—the lifting of the burden and the heat of the day, the little wind that shook the fronds of the date palms and stole about bringing odours from where the people were cooking, the unyoked oxen, the hoarse home-going talk of the crows that flew city-ward against the yellow sky with a purple light on their wings. “Let the carriage stay here,” Judith said, as they stopped beside a dilapidated barred gate. “I want to walk to the house.” A salaaming creature in a _dhoty_ hurried out of a clump of bamboos in the corner and flung open the gate. It seemed to close again upon the world. They were in an undulating waste that had once been a stately pleasure-ground, and it had a visible soul that lived upon its memories and was content in its abandonment. It was so still that the great teak leaves, twisted and discoloured and full of holes like battered bronze, dropping singly and slowly through the mellow air, fell at their feet with little rustling cracks. “What a perfection of silence!” Judith exclaimed softly; and then some vague perception impelled her to talk of other things—of her dinner-party and Nellie Vansittart. Ancram looked on, as it were, at her conversation for a moment or two with his charming smile. Then, “Oh, dear lady,” he broke in, “let them go—those people. They are the vulgar considerations of the time which has been—which will be again. But this is a pause—made for _us_.”