And Alice let her face rest in Lady Gale’s dress and she promised. There was, as it happened, more in her promise than mere acquiescence. She had her own curiosity as to the way it was all going to turn out, and perhaps, deep in her heart, a hope that this girl down in the town would be nothing after all, and that Tony would return, when the two or three weeks were over, to his senses. But the real temptation that attacked her was terribly severe. It would be fatally easy to talk to Sir Richard, and, without saying anything either definite or circumstantial, to put him unmistakably on the track. The immediate issue would, of course, be instant marching orders for everybody, and that would be the last that Tony would see of his rustic. Her thoughts lingered around the girl. What was she like, she wondered? Coarse, with a face of beetroot red and flaxen hair; no, Tony had taste, he would know what to choose. She was probably pretty. Wild and uncouth, perhaps; that would be likely to catch him. And now she, Alice Du Cane, must stand quietly by and play the part of platonic friend. What fun life must be for the gods who had time to watch. Meanwhile Tony had found Maradick in a deserted corner of the garden and had poured the afternoon’s history into his ears. It was a complete manual on the way to make love, and it came out in a stream of uninterrupted eloquence, with much repetition and a continual impulse to hark back to the central incident of the story. “And then, at last, I told her!” A small bird in a nest above their heads woke for a moment and felt a little thrill of sympathy. “By heaven, Maradick, old man, I had never lived until then. She and I were swept into Paradise together, and for a moment earth had gone, rolled away, vanished; I can’t talk about it, I can’t really. But there we were on the sand with the sea and the sky! Oh, my word! I can’t make you feel it, only now I am hers always and she is mine. I am her slave, her knight. One always used to think, you know, that all the stuff men and women put about it in books was rot and dreadfully dull at that, but now it all seems different. Poetry, music, all the things that one loved, are different now. They are new, wonderful, divine! and there we were in the boat, you know, just drifting anywhere.” Maradick played audience to this enthusiasm with a somewhat melancholy patience. He had felt like that once about Mrs. Maradick. How absurd! He saw her as he had seen her last with the bed-clothes gathered about her in a scornful heap and her eyes half closed but flashing fire. She had refused to speak to him! And he had kissed her once and felt like Tony.