Perhaps they had not asked him. Maybe that was it. I said something about how we should miss Hermione. "Er--yes," he said. "I suppose you will," and I noticed his voice was steadier. "Don't be ungrateful," I said. "So will you." "Me?" Then, as I reproached him, he said: "Oh, yes; awfully nice people the Helmstones. I used to be rather fond of Lady Helmstone. But she's a woman who doesn't know how to take 'No.' That's partly why I came." I looked back again: "Is that the only reason?" "Well, she kept writing, and making out, in spite of what I'd said, that she was expecting me to join them at Marseilles. And had put off somebody else who wanted to go. If I backed out--I had never backed in--I would be breaking up the party and behaving like the devil." He spoke more ill-temperedly than I had ever heard him. "How will it end?" I asked. "End? I'm hanged if I'll go. I've told her I wouldn't, from the beginning. But I only convinced her yesterday." We walked on. "They've asked Betty," I said. "_No!_" He caught me up and walked at my side. "When did they do that?" "Yesterday evening." "Is Betty going?" "No," I said. And very sharp on that: "Why not?" he asked. "Doesn't she want to?" "She doesn't know anything about it. My mother doesn't want her to go." And while he fell into silence again, I sent my eyes about the heath. No sign. Suddenly I remembered Betty's "find out." I had not found out. I hadn't even tried, and I realised myself for a monster of selfishness--thinking Eric, Eric, and nothing but Eric the livelong day. I pulled myself together and asked Ranny what he had been doing since Christmas. "Since New Year's Eve, you mean." He frowned, and threw away a cigarette half-smoked, and lit another. When he had puffed and frowned a little more he said he had been going through a ghastly experience with a great friend of his. "Not a bad chap on the whole," he said, in a hesitating, almost appealing voice. But this not bad chap had "got himself badly bunkered." Ranny hesitated, and then: "Yes, I've been thinking I'd tell you about it, and see if--if you thought I've advised him right...." The friend, he said, had been "one of a house party at a place up in Norfolk. He'd gone for the fag end of the shooting. Last month it was. Beastly dull people. Awful good shooting--as a rule. But the weather was rotten. All shut up together in that beastly dull house. Nothing earthly to do, except rag, and--you know the kind of thing." I didn't know a bit, but I said I did. "Well, his friend had nothing to do, and he got it into his head that the girl of the house rather liked him. And there wasn't another blessed thing to do, so---- Oh, well, they got engaged."