"You are taking a great deal for granted, I think," said Roma, becoming interested. "And why should you not give credit for sometimes having other motives than pleasure to--" "other classes besides your own," she was going to have added, but the words struck her as ill-bred. "I mean to say," she went on, choosing her words with difficulty, a very unusual state of things for her--"don't you think it possible people--an idle person, like me, we will say--ever do anything or go anywhere with any other motive than pleasure or amusement? I think it a great mistake to take up those wholesale notions. As it happens, I _do_ know something of the north--yes, of the north, in your sense of the word," for she fancied he looked incredulous. "I only left Wareborough yesterday morning." ("I needn't tell _you_ what took me up there," she added to herself, smiling as she remembered how she had teased Beauchamp by her exaggerated account of the motives of her visit to Deepthorne). "Wareborough!" exclaimed Mr Thurston. Roma was amused by his evident surprise. "How very odd! Wareborough is my home. I hope to be there again by Wednesday or Thursday. But that can't interest you," he went on, looking a little ashamed of his own eagerness; "and of course it isn't really odd. People must be travelling between Wareborough and Brighton every day. One gets in the way of exaggerating trifles of the kind absurdly when one has lived some time so completely out of the world as I have done. It struck me as such a curious little coincidence, for I think you are the first lady I have had any conversation with since I landed. I came by long sea too, for the sake of an invalid friend, so my chances of re-civilising myself have been very small, so far." "It _was_ an odd little coincidence," replied Roma, good-humouredly. "But after all, you know," she added, "the world is very small." He hardly caught the sense of her remark. "In one sense, I suppose it is," he said, slowly; "but in another--all, no, Miss Eyrecourt, you are fortunate if you have never felt how dreadfully big the world is! It used to seem a perfectly frightful way off from everything--everybody I cared for, out there sometimes." He spoke gravely, and with an introspective look in his eyes, as if reviewing past anxieties known only to himself. "And then," he went on in the same tone, "absence is absence, after all. One can never count surely on finding any one, or anything what one left them." "Nought looks the same save the nest we made," said Roma, softly. "Don't laugh at me, Mr Thurston--fray don't," she went on, hurriedly. "I am not the least sentimental. I never look at poetry, only sometimes little rubbishy bits I learnt as a child come into my head and `give me feelings,' as I once heard a little girl say."