They found food for growth later on in what she was pleased, perhaps rightly, to imagine a preoccupation in his manner. She was, of course, aware of his effort to dilute what was emotional in their intercourse, and to replace it with a tender and unashamed fraternity. Of that he made no secret; and she made very little of her resolve to thwart it. He had but small success but more than he expected. He declined several invitations to Wallingford during the summer, where she had again a house; and when he went in August, found her, thanks partly to the persistence of some exacting and undesired guests, more malleable than she had ever been before. He had been so attentively kind to her during the season that she found no excuse to upbraid him, yet she showed by a dozen disdainful poses how fiercely she resented his determined friendliness. Meanwhile he had seen little of Lilias. His devotion to her was too sensitive and too entire to allow him even to offer her his company while he had still, however occasionally, to bestow his kisses on another woman. That woman too was still a moral charge upon him, and a source beside of incalculable danger. What she would not do was clearly not everywhere conterminous with what she should not. He had sufficiently realized that his happiness would never appeal to her apart from hers, and that there would be a stormy finish where hers ended. But he still trusted in time, and was satisfied with the slight progress towards reasonableness in their relationship. Her letters continued to upbraid him with his neglect; but they began to hint at a reciprocal attitude. She too, they threatened, could be indifferent; the time might come when to his appeal there would be no response. Terence prayed devoutly for that day to hasten, as the months went on; and ran down in November, ostensibly for a week's hunting, to a house in Leicestershire where Miss Anstruther was staying. Knowing the country better than he, she offered to pilot him, and took him under her charge with a delightful assurance, which allowed him no voice nor choice of his own while out of doors. She rode straight, but used her head, in cutting out a line, to nurse her horse, and showed a most unfeminine appreciation of distances, save when the hounds were running late away from home. During the long easy amble homeward in the dusk, on such occasions Terence might have been led to doubt that it was inadvertence which had secured him so much of her company, had he not arrived at conclusions of much greater moment. To have found, at thirty-five when such discoveries are being despaired of the woman for whom his life had waited for whom, unknown, it had worn its innocence untainted, was sufficient of itself to monopolize his thoughts. In her presence he became young again; young in interests, in expectancy, in purposeless energies. The whole desire of the man was in focus for the first time in his life.