He moved a little away from her. Here were more confidences coming! Why had all the world suddenly taken it into its incautious head to trust him with its secrets? He! Maradick! whom no one had ever dreamt of trusting with anything before? “No, I don’t want to bother you. It won’t bother you, will it? Only it is such a rest and a comfort to be able to tell some one.” She spoke with a little catch in her voice, but she was thinking of the year before when she had trusted Captain Stanton, “dear old Reggie,” with similar confidences; and there had been Freddie Stapylton before that. Well, they had all been very nice about it, and she was sure that this big man with the brown neck and the curly hair would be just as nice. “No, but you will be a friend of mine, won’t you?” she said. “A woman wants a friend, a good, sensible, strong friend to whom she can tell things, and I have nobody. It will be such a comfort if I can talk to you sometimes.” “Please,” he said. Providence seemed to have designed him as a kind of general nursemaid to a lot of irresponsible children. “Ah! that’s good of you.” She gave a little sigh and stared out to sea. “Of course, I’m not complaining, other women have had far worse times, I know that; but it is the loneliness that hurts so. If there is only one person who understands it all it will make such a difference.” Mrs. Lester was not at all insincere. She liked Maradick very much, and her having liked Captain Stanton and Mr. Stapylton before him made no difference at all. Those others had been very innocent flirtations and no harm whatever had come of them, and then Treliss was such an exciting place that things always did happen. It must also be remembered that she had that morning quarrelled with her husband. “You see,” she said, “I suppose I was always rather a romantic girl. I loved colour and processions and flowers and the Roman Catholic Church. I used to go into the Brompton Oratory and watch the misty candles and listen to them singing from behind the altars and sniff the incense. And then I read Gautier and Merimée and anything about Spain. And then I went to Italy, and I thought I could never leave it with the dear donkeys and Venice and carnivals, but we had to get back for Ascot. Oh! I suppose it was all very silly and like lots of other girls, but it was all very genuine, Mr. Maradick.” He nodded his head. “It’s so sweet of you to understand,” she said. “Well, like most girls, I crowded all these dreams into marriage. That was going to do everything for me. Oh! he was to be such a hero, and I was to be such a wife to him. Dear me! How old it makes one feel when one thinks of those girlish days!” But Maradick only thought that she looked very young indeed, Tony’s age.