Christian sat in the sunshine, and thought about Larry, and wondered. She knew now that what she felt for him was no new thing. It had been with her always, not merely since the painting of her portrait, but always, unacknowledged yet implicit, ever since that first day when he had rescued her from Richard. Her intensely criticising, analytic brain refused to surrender to vague emotion. She was resolved to understand herself, to rationalise her overthrow. It was the difference, for which that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the degree of what she felt, that bewildered her. Yesterday, she told herself, it was a deep, but well-controlled and respectable little stream. To-day it was a flood. "I must keep my feet," she thought; "I must not be swept away!" The thought of him was sometimes overwhelming, like the fire of a summer noon; sometimes meditative, and wound about with memories, like twilight, and the song of the thrush; even at its least, it had been the glow that lives behind the northern horizon in midsummer, witnessing to the hidden glory, during darkness, or the wistful glimmer of stars. Now, while the sun went higher, and all the hum of life rose, and the cries of the water-birds, the buzz of insects over the bright lake, became more insistent, and the blue and lovely morning spread and strengthened round her, criticism and analysis failed. She could only think of him, helplessly, saying to herself what she had once heard a peasant woman say: "My heart'd open when I thinks of him." Across the park came repeated notes from the horn, the baying of hounds, and the screams that celebrate with orthodox excitement the death of a fox. The rat-hunt was over. Joker lifted his spare, aristocratic head from the grass, and listened, with a wisp of dewy green stuff in his mouth. Christian looked at her watch. It was early still, not eight o'clock. A grey horse and its rider came forth from the dark grove of laurels. Larry was looking for her. She sighed; she did not know why. She thought of the old Mendelssohn open-air part-song: "The talk of the lovers in silence dies, They weep, yet they know not why tears fill their eyes." The old, absurd words, that she had so often laughed at. She laughed again, but at herself, and sat still, watching the grey mare coming lightly over the sunny grass to her. "They got him!" Larry shouted, as he came near. "The brute wouldn't run for 'em! Too full of hen, I suppose! They're going on now to the gorse in the high paddock. Why did you come away here?" "Because I'm illogical. I like hunting, and I hate catching what I hunt. Besides, I wanted to think." "Rotten habit," said Larry. "I won't have you changing your mind!"