"Yes," said Edward, controlling Charles, who had just seen the peaches and thought they looked like something to eat. "But--if you won't think me a selfish brute I should like to say just one thing." "Yes--" She wrinkled her brows apprehensively. "Neither Charles nor I have had any luncheon. Would you very much mind if we--" "Oh, how hateful of me not to remember!" she said. "Let me come and talk to you and feed Charles. What a darling he is! And you do forgive me, and you do understand? And we're friends again, just as we were before?" "Yes. Just as we were." "It's curious," she said, as they went back through the red and green and blue and yellow of the garden, "that I feel as though I knew you ever so much better, now we've quarreled." Mr. Schultz had, it appeared, after all, paid for the two luncheons. Edward sent him two ten-pound notes and the sovereign, "with compliments and thanks." "And that's the end of poor Mr. Schultz," she said, gaily, and, as it proved, with complete inaccuracy. VIII THE ROAD TO ---- THE drive to London was a silent one. Mr. Basingstoke did not want to talk; he had come on one of those spaces where the emotions sleep, exhausted. He felt nothing any more, neither anxiety as to the future nor pleasure at the nearness of the furry heap beside him under which, presently, his companion slumbered peacefully as a babe in its cot. His mind was blank, his heart was numbed; it was not till the car reached the houses spilled over the pretty fields like ugly toys emptied out of the play-box of a giant child, that mind or heart made any movement. Then it happened that the breeze caught the edge of the fur and lifted it, and he saw her little face softly flushed with sleep, lying very near him, and his heart seemed all at once to come to life again with an awakening stab of something that was not affection or even passion, but a kind of protective exultation--a deep, keen longing to take care of, to guard, to infold safely from all possible dangers and sorrows her who slept so happy-helpless beside him. Then his mind awoke, too, and he found himself wondering. The Schultz episode, his suspicions, resentment--the explication--all this should, one would have thought, have brushed, like a rough hand, the bloom from the adventure. And, instead of taking anything away, it had, even as she had said, added a soft touch of intimacy to their friendship. Further, he now in his heart had the memory that, for an instant, his thoughts had wronged her, that he had suspected her of wavering, almost of light-mindedness, though his thought had taken no such definite lines even to itself in its secret heart--and all the time there had only been thought for him, sincere, delicate consideration, and, in the matter of that man's accepted help, the trust of a child, and that innocence of Una before which even lions like Schultz become shy and safe. Imagine a subject who has suspected