_Roger_ (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you’re just as pretty as you were five years ago—a little filled out perhaps.... And _this_ is how we meet. How _utterly_ different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh _how_ you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can’t say _I_ didn’t write—when I got a chance.... Or that I didn’t work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry—and _now_ I hear from Maud you’re going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn’t come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden—I suppose it was _you_! And this is what women call _fidelity_!" _Sibyl_ (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case—not mere romantic school girls—they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and _very_ unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I’m sure you won’t have enough to marry on for several years—I should never again get such a chance ... and I really _do_ like Lord Silchester, you don’t know _how_ kind he can be—and you can’t _really_ care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even _wrote_ to me...." _Roger_: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the _World_ ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "_Missionary_ meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."