Catherine, when they rose from the table, found Villars by her side, in a manner that irresistibly implied that he meant to have a stroll with her, and leaving the others--Maud had already towed Alice Yardly out of Thurso's immediate neighbourhood, and was listening to a fearfully interminable account of Mrs. Eddy's relation to Phineas P. Quimby--they went down through the door cut in the yew-hedge, which had so roused Theodosia's enthusiasm, to stroll along the river-front and catch the last of the evening light. Opposite, on the other bank of the river, a tent was pitched, and outside it three or four young men were seated, having supper at a tablecloth spread on the grass, and lit by a couple of Chinese lanterns. Their fire for cooking burned bravely on the river edge, and the smell of aromatic wood-smoke was wafted across to them. It all looked exquisitely simple and uncomplicated. Catherine rather envied that, for her own life just now seemed involved and ravelled; she did not feel confidence in the future. Indeed, she was not sure whether even the next ten minutes would be quite easy, for woman of the world though she was, and conversational engineer, skilled at directing the flow of talk into the channels in which she wished it to run, she felt vaguely nervous with her companion. At dinner he had been the polished, suggestive talker, but it had seemed to her all the time as if he was talking from the surface only, saying the quick, glib things that came so easily to him. And now, when they had separated themselves from the others, she found her impression had been correct. "It was so good of you to ask me here," he said, "quietly, like this; for it means that you admit me again to friendship and intimacy with you--at least, so I take it." He struck a match to light his cigarette, holding it in the screen of his hollowed hands, so that the flame illuminated his face very vividly. He had changed extraordinarily little: his dark eyes still had the sparkle of fire and youth in them, and their corners were still unseamed and unwrinkled. His face had grown neither stout nor attenuated; his hair was still untouched by grey, and a plume of it hung, as she had always remembered it, a little apart and over his forehead. He wore neither moustache nor beard, and a very short upper lip separated his large and essentially masculine mouth from a thin, aquiline nose. Then, as he flicked his match away, he threw back his head with the gesture she knew so well. "Or is that presumptuous of me?" he asked. "I charge you to tell me that, and not let me go on being presumptuous unwittingly." She laughed. "It is not in the least presumptuous," she said. "I ask the whole world to a ball or a big party, since it does not matter who is there, owing to the crowd. But here in the country I ask only the people I want to see, or for some reason have got to see--you are not among the latter--and the more one wants to see of them, the smaller is the party."