During the whole of their talk there had been no word, no hint, of the existence of the other's wife, who, as Wantley, by a mere chance word uttered in his presence in the house where he had recently been staying, happened to know, was even now in England, the honoured guest of one of his uncle's old fellow-workers. He said to himself that there was a fascination about Downing, a something which might even now make him beloved by the type of woman--Wantley imagined the meek, affectionate, and intensely feminine type of woman--who is attracted by that air of physical strength which is so often allied, in Englishmen, to mental power. He felt that the man he had just left, sitting solitary, had in his nature the capacity of enjoying ideal love and companionship, and the young man, regarding himself as so blessed, regretted that this good thing had been denied to the man who had spoken of it with so much comprehension. Slowly making his way upwards from the shore, Wantley turned aside, and lingered a few moments on the second of the three terraces. Here, in this still, remote place, on this natural ledge of the cliff, guarded by a stone balustrade which terminated at intervals with fantastic urns, now gay with geranium blossoms, gaining intensity of colour by the background of blue sky and bluer waters, he had only the day before, for a delicious hour, read aloud to Cecily Wake. From his father Wantley had inherited, and as a boy acquired, an exceptional love and knowledge of old English poetry, and, giving but grudging and unwilling praise to modern verse, he had been whimsically pleased to discover that to the girl Chaucer and La Fontaine were more familiar names than Browning and Tennyson, of whose works, indeed, she had been ignorant till she went to the Settlement, where, however, Philip Hammond had soon made her feel terribly ashamed of her ignorance. Standing there, his thoughts of Cecily, of Downing, of Persian mysticism, chasing one another through his mind, Wantley suddenly remembered Miss Theresa Wake, doubtless still sitting solitary in her hooded chair. II Cecily's aunt, whom he himself already secretly regarded with the not altogether uncritical eye of a relation, was to Wantley a new and amusing variety of old lady. Miss Theresa Wake had the appearance, common to so many women of her generation, of having been petrified in early middle age. A brown hair front lent spurious youth to the thin, delicate face, and her slight, elegant figure was only now becoming bent. It was impossible to imagine her young, but equally difficult to believe that she would ever grow really old.