Of the heart-searchings, of the contest between her love and her beliefs, which even now (as the slow train jolted her, maidless, uncomfortable, in her crowded first-class compartment, out of Andover) still nagged at the intellect of Julia Cavendish, her son had never an inkling. From his point of view, their quarrel--for his share in which he had already apologized by letter--appeared infinitely more important than "the mater's silly prejudice about divorce." Most important, of course, would be "how the mater would hit it off with Aliette." Ronnie drove on till he made the Chilton Arms; and there, stabling his pony, ordered himself an early luncheon. The luncheon--solitary cold beef and lukewarm beer--made him realize that it was more than six weeks since he had mealed alone; and from that realization thought traveled--almost automatically--to his rooms in Jermyn Street, to Pump Court, to the past which had been London and the future which must still be London. Smoking, he began to consider the various problems of return. Where, how, and on what were he and Aliette to live? Of Aliette's finances, beyond one confided fact that "she had never taken an allowance from "H.," her lover knew nothing whatever. She might, for all he cared, possess five hundred a year or ten thousand. But his own professional income, excluding the four hundred a year from his mother, barely touched the former figure; and since he was by no means the kind of creature who could consent to live on a woman's money, however desperately he might be in love with her, the housing problem alone--Moses Moffatt, officially, sheltered only bachelors--would need more than a little solving. Consideration of this, and other mundane factors in their somewhat bizarre situation, fretted Ronnie's mind. He could not help feeling, as he drove slowly to the station, how much wiser it would have been if he and Alie had talked these things over before he started. His mother, who liked practical women, might not understand that Alie and he had been too madly happy to bother about every-day affairs. "But by Jove!" he said to himself; "by Jove, we _have_ been happy." He hitched the brown pony to the railings and strode through the waiting-room. That afternoon Chilton Junction seemed less of a junction than ever. A few rustics, a few milk-cans, two porters, and the miniature of a bookstall occupied its "down" platform; its "up" showed as a stretch of deserted gravel, from either end of which the hot rails ran straight into pasture. Looking Londonward along those narrowing rails, remembering how, six weeks since, they had carried him into paradise, Ronald Cavendish understood--for the merest fraction of a second--his mother's sacrifice. "Damn decent of the old lady to come down," he thought, seeing, still far away across the pastures, the leisured smoke-plume of her train. 3