“You bring me down to earth with such thuds,” with a plaintive air. “I dream of stately halls, and modern heroines gracing ancient shrines, and you annihilate both the vision and the poetry in one merciless blow, metaphorically flinging a Shepherd’s Bush ’bus at my head. As it is quite out of the question for me to inflict myself upon the lovers, I must take you home in a taxi.” “I am going in a ’bus,” willfully. “If you want a cab drive, go to your club,” and she turned her steps resolutely toward the road. “I see you mean to be unmanageable—but I can wait—my time will come. If I see you getting pale and ill-looking, it will come sooner than you think.” “I don’t think at all. I haven’t time—at least not to think of you. My bottles and prescriptions interest me far more.” “Liar,” he murmured humorously—looking hard into her face—and her mobile mouth twitched irresistibly as she crossed the road to her ’bus. She climbed on the top to get the air, in spite of the moist November atmosphere, and though she had been spirited to the last with Lawrence, her heart grew heavy as they trundled down Notting Hill toward the enveloping greyness of Shepherd’s Bush, and she wondered if she had been wise to go. It was not the first time that Paddy had had misgivings about the wisdom of seeing much of Gwen. She always hated the commonplace, middle-class streets so afterward, the stuffy little dispensary, with its rows of foolish, inane-looking jars, and monotonous medicine bottles; the hopeless mediocrity of her whole surroundings. At moments she longed passionately to be with Jack galloping over the grass plains of the Argentine; and her heart was sore at the fate which had condemned her of all people to mixing medicines in a dingy suburb. She even ruminated a little wistfully, if only Lawrence had not been Lawrence. If some other man had lived at Mourne Lodge, and wanted her to make her home there, what a heaven on earth she might have had! Or if even Lawrence had been different—and there had been no dividing memory. How strange it seemed that he should combine such charm with such heartlessness. She understood better now, how it was Eileen had become a victim. It was natural enough, since it had pleased him to please her. But she knew more of the other side, had known it all along, through her greater friendship with his sisters. Only that morning, in a letter from home, Doreen had written: “Lawrence has been shooting pheasants in Suffolk. Long may he stay there. Before he went, and just after you left the Parsonage he was in one of his most bearish moods. If he wasn’t sullen he was cutting. He either sulked or sneered till we were sick of him in the house. Of course Kathleen quarrelled with him about the way he spoke to mother, which is so silly of her, as mother understands him, and doesn’t really take any notice; whereas Kathleen ends in making us all miserable. However, he had the goodness to take himself off after the 12th, and it’s been