At his own game, his speciality, Harry Belfield could give away all the odds, and still be a formidable opponent. The incomparable love-maker could almost overcome his own treasons; he left such a memory, such a pattern. Isobel loved still; Mrs. Freere was ready to come back; Lady Lucy owned to herself that she was in danger of being very silly. Even the Nun was in the habit of congratulating herself on a certain escape, with the implication that the escape was an achievement. To resist him an achievement! To forget him--what could that be? To Andy it seemed that for any woman it must be an impossibility. In the veiled distance of Vivien's eyes, when the talk veered towards her unfaithful lover, he could find no dissent. Was oblivion a necessity? Here he was--in Harry's place. Did he forget? They let him rest--with his thoughts; they saw that the big fellow was weary. The old Belfields conducted one another into the house; Vivien took Sally off again with her. Only Doris Flower sat on by him, silent too, revolving in her mind the chronicles of Meriton, the little town with which her whim had brought her into such close touch, from which she was not now minded wholly to separate herself. It seemed like an anchorage in the wandering sea of her life. It offered some things very good--a few firm friends, a sense of home, a place where she was Doris Flower, not merely the Nun, the Quaker, or Joan of Arc. Did she wish that it offered yet more? Ah, there she paused! She was a worker born, as Andy himself was. No work for her lay in Meriton. Perhaps she desired incompatibles, like many of us; being clear-eyed, she saw the incompatibility. And she was not subjected to temptation. She was taken at the valuation which she so carefully put on herself--the good comrade of the lighter hours. No cause of complaint then? None! She did not cry, she did not fall in love. She did not break her records. There is small merit in records unless they are hard to make, and sometimes hard to keep. She stretched out her hand and laid it on his arm. He turned to her with a start, roused from his weariness and his reverie. "Dear Andy, have you learnt what we have, I wonder? Not yet, I expect!" "What do you mean, Doris?" "Trust in you. A certainty that you'll bring it off!" She laughed--a little nervously. "I've a professional eye for a situation. Try for a double victory to-morrow! Make a really fine day for yourself--one to remember always!" She drew her hand away with another nervous laugh; her clear soft voice had trembled. Andy's inward feelings leapt to utterance. "Have you any notion of what I feel? I--I'm up against him in everything! It's almost uncanny. And I think he'll beat me in this. At least I suppose you mean--?" "Yes, I mean that." Her voice was calm again, a little mocking. "But I shall say no more about it."