“I like to feel I am standing on firm ground,” said Frances Thorold, and returned to her sketch with an air of finality as though thereby the subject were closed. Montague took out a cigarette-case and opened it, offering it to her with the same abstracted air. She shook her head without looking at him. “No, thank you. I’ve never taken to it. I’ve never had time.” “It seems to me that you have never had time for anything that’s worth doing,” he said, as he took one himself. “That is true,” she said in her brief way. There fell a silence between them. Montague leaned upon his elbow smoking, his eyes half-closed, but still curiously fixed upon the long spray of honeysuckle as though the flowers presented to him some problem. Frances worked gravely at her sketch, just as she had worked in the Bishop’s room at Burminster a fortnight before, too deeply absorbed to spare any attention for any interest outside that upon which she was engaged. It was her way to concentrate thus. Suddenly through the summer silence there came a sound—the voice of a little child singing in the lane below—an unintelligible song, without tune, but strangely sweet, as the first soft song of a twittering bird in the dawning. Frances lifted her head. She looked at Montague. “Did you leave your car in the lane?” “I did,” he said, wondering a little at the sudden anxiety in her eyes. “Ah!” She was on her feet with the word, her sketching almost flung aside. “She’ll run into it.” “Absurd!” he protested. “Not if she has eyes to see!” “Ah!” Frances said again. “She hasn’t!” She was gone even while she spoke, springing for the gap through which he had forced his way a few minutes earlier, calling as she went in tones tender, musical, such as he had never believed her capable of uttering. “Mind, little darling! Mind! Wait till I come to you!” She was gone from his sight. He heard her slipping down the bank into the mud of the lane. He heard the child’s voice lifted in wonder but not in fear. “You are the pretty lady who came to see the cows. May I hold your hand?” And Frances’ answering voice with a deep throb in it that oddly made the listening man stiffen as one who listens to undreamt-of music:—“Of course you shall, sweetheart. We will walk up the road together and find some honeysuckle.” The man’s eyes came swiftly downwards to the flowers that trailed neglected where her feet had been. So she did love honeysuckle after all! With a movement of violence half-suppressed he snatched up the pink and white blossoms and threw them away. CHAPTER VI THE CAPTURE