“Yes; but we all are that, aren’t we?” He says it simply, and without any special observation of her to note its effect; and yet once again, for the third time, that nameless suspicious fear of his having found her out lays its chilly fingers upon her. “Shall we walk off some of our exuberant cheerfulness? Do you feel inclined for a stroll?” Her last “stroll” returns upon her memory with dizzying vividness. “Isn’t the sun rather hot still?” “We shall not feel him in the woods, or in Rumsey Brake by the pool.” Her tilted chair--needless defence--falls on its fore legs with a sharp noise, dropped from her trembling grasp. “I do not think I feel woody or poolly.” “We will go along the high-road, then, the road to Sutton Rivers. There is always a good deal of traffic along that road--nice carts and steam-rollers and things!” A spice of the old light mockery flavours his tone, and she knows that he has read off like print the misgiving in her mind. If he has read that, how much more may he not have read too? The road chosen drops down the hill, and runs through the village. They pass the beautiful old farm that looks like a manor-house, with its bronzing walnut trees that wear their spring favours differently from most others; past schools and open cottage doors, Rupert greeting shirt-sleeved men with the familiarity born of a lifetime of nods, and Lavinia saluting matronly women with an intimacy sprung from maternity-bags. And as she goes, the village tragedies present themselves for competition with her own. Can that girl who has “gone wrong,” and is sitting on her parents’ doorstep with her unfathered child upon her knees, feel a greater weight of remorse and shame than one kiss has crushed her under? Can the old widow whose last surviving son was carried off yesterday to the madhouse, feel a deeper, more irreparable sense of loss than hers? “Joe Perry was taken away to the asylum yesterday,” she says, imparting her lugubrious fact, though not the comparison for which she has used it, to her companion. “He became so violent that it was unavoidable. His mother, I believe, fought like a tiger to prevent it!” “Poor soul!” What fitter ejaculation can he make in answer to such a tale? and yet her diseased fancy instantly brings to mind that Binning had applied the same epithet to Féodorovna! As they pass another cottage-- “Carter has gone on the drink again.” “Has he?” Yet a third. “Little Harry Brown has got double pneumonia; the doctor does not think he can save him! He says he has no constitution.” “Is it to bring down that exuberant cheerfulness of ours that we were talking of, that you are telling me all these catastrophes?” asks Rupert, rebelling at last. “It does seem rather hard to be greeted by such a list of casualties,” she answers, confused and confounded; “but you see you have been away a good while--long enough for more than our _usual_ average of disasters to happen.”