He had often, during those long hours, thought of the Duchess. He had, always, in his heart, considered her affection for him strange; he knew that it was difficult for her to be patient with fools and he knew that his own intellectual gifts were on no very high level. He based her friendship for him on the naive transparency with which he displayed his frankly pagan indulgences. His love for Rachel and this accident had changed all that. He was still pagan enough at heart, but there were other things in his world. Principally it occurred to him now that one couldn't judge about the way things looked to other people, and the Duchess, of course, always _did_ judge; if they didn't look her way, why then wipe them out! He had, in fact, much less now to say to the Duchess; he was afraid that he would no longer agree with her about things--"Of course she knows the world and is a damn clever woman, but she's jolly well too hard on people who aren't quite her style--She'd put my back up, I believe, if she talked." He had, indeed, always been uncomfortable at the old lady's approaches to sentiment. She was never sentimental with other people--He _hated_ sentiment in anyone except, of course, Rachel and she never _was_ sentimental. He looked out now upon the road that ran through the park beyond his window, watched the nursemaids and the children, the old gentlemen, the girls, the smart women and the pale young men with books and the smart young men with shiny hats, and he wondered about them all. Sometimes when the grass, was very green, when high white clouds piled one upon another hung above the pond whose corner he could just see, thoughts of his little grey house, his gardens, the Downs, his horses and dogs would come to him-- "Come out! Come out!" a sparrow would dance on his window ledge-- "Damn you, I can't!" he would cry and then his eyes would fly to Rachel's photograph--"If I get her it will be worth it, won't it, Jacob, my son?" He talked continually to Jacob and found great comfort in the stolid assurance with which the dog would wag his stump of a tail--"He's more than human, that dog," he would tell Rachel; "funny how I never used to see anything in him." Of course there were many days when life was utterly impossible; then he would snap at everyone, lie scowling at the park, curse his impotence, his miserable degraded infirmities. "Curse it, to die in a ditch like this--to be broken up, to be smashed...." His majestic butler--now the tenderest and most devoted of attendants--stood these evil days with great equanimity. "Bless you, of course he's bound to be wild now and again--wonder is it don't happen more often--It does him good to curse a bit." So things were with him until the day of the Duchess's visit. His surprise at seeing her was confused with an assurance that "she had come for something." After her departure what she had come for was plain enough to see.