She looked up and met his glance. "Yes, after the holidays," she repeated absently. "You go to Ashwood?" There was a pause before she answered. It came into her mind suddenly that it would have been strange to go to Ashwood as Weston Marchmont's promised wife. Why she could not quite tell; perhaps because such a position would set her very much outside of all that was being thought and talked of there, indeed in a quasi-antagonism to it. Anyhow the position would make her feel quite differently towards it all. "Yes," she answered at last, and mustered a laugh as she added, "I'm not so particular as you, you know. And Amy wants me." "I wish you always did what people want you to," said he, smiling. Their parting was in this lighter vein, although on his side still tender and on hers penitent. In both was a consciousness of not understanding, of being somehow apart, of an inexplicable difficulty in taking one another's point of view. The solution of sympathy, the break that May had talked of, made itself apparent again. In spite of self-reproaches, her strongest feeling, when she was left alone, was of joy that her freedom still was hers. CHAPTER V. WHIMSY-WHAMSIES. At Ashwood the sun was sinking after a bright April afternoon. Mrs. Baxter sat in a chair on the lawn and discoursed wisdom to May Gaston and Morewood. The rest of the party had gone for a walk to the top of what Lady Richard called "Duty Hill"; it was the excursion obligatory on all guests. "The real reason," remarked Mrs. Baxter, who was making a garment--she was under spiritual contract to make two a month--"why the Dean hasn't risen higher is because he always has some whimsy-whamsy in his head." "What are they? I never have 'em," said Morewood, relighting his pipe. "You never have anything else," said Mrs. Baxter in a brief but sufficient aside. "And, my dear," she continued to May, "what you want in a bishop is reliability." "The only thing I want in a bishop is absence," grunted Morewood. "Reliability?" murmured May, half assenting, half questioning. "Yes, my dear," said Mrs. Baxter, biting her thread. "Reliability. I shall finish this petticoat to-morrow unless I have to drive with Lady Richard. You don't want him to be original, or to do much, except his confirmations and so on, of course; but you do want to be sure that he won't fly out at something or somebody. Dan got a reputation for not being quite reliable. I don't know how, because I haven't time to go into his notions. But there it was. Somebody told the Prime Minister and he crossed out Dan's name and put in John Wentworth's." Morewood yawned obtrusively. "What a shame!" May murmured at random. "It's just the same with a husband," Mrs. Baxter observed. "Only it's rather more difficult to scratch out his name and put in John Wentworth's," Morewood suggested. May laughed. "But anyhow the Dean's a good husband, isn't he, Mrs. Baxter?"