"I love the country and I am growing to love and understand the place. John wants me to so much, it means more to him than anything else in the world. I shall remain until after Christmas anyway. But come now, I want just to take you into the church, because there are two such fine tombs there of both our ancestors, yours and mine. We can go out of the windows and come back for coffee in the cedar parlour." Denzil acquiesced; he wished to see the church. They reached it in a minute or two and Amaryllis opened the door with her own key and led him on up the aisle to the recumbent knights--and then she whispered their history to him, standing where a ray of sunlight turned her brown hair into gold. "I wonder what their lives were," Denzil said, "and if they lived and loved and fought their desires--as we do now--the younger one's face looks as though he had not always conquered his. Stepan would say his indulgences had become his masters, not his servants, I expect." "Verisschenzko is wonderful--he makes one want to be strong," and Amaryllis sighed. "I wonder how many of us even begin to fight our desires--" "One has to be strong always if one wants to attain--but sometimes it is only honour which holds one--and weaklings are so pitiful." "What is honour?" Her eyes searched his face wistfully. "Is it being true to some canon of the laws of chivalry, or is it being true to some higher thing in one's own soul?" Denzil leaned against the tomb and he thought deeply: then he looked straight into her eyes: "Honour lies in not betraying a trust reposed in one, either in the spirit or in the letter." "Then, when, we say of a man 'he acted honourably,' we mean that he did not betray a trust placed in him, even if it was only perhaps by circumstance and not by a person." "It is simply that'--keeping faith. If a man stole a sum of money from a friend, the dishonour would not be in the act of stealing, which is another offence--but in abusing his friend's trust in him by committing that act." "Dishonour is a betrayal then--" "Of course." "Why would this knight"--and she placed her hand on the marble face, "have said that he must kill another who had stolen his wife, say, to avenge his 'honour'?" "That is the conventional part of it--what Stepan calls the grafting on of a meaning to suit some idea of civilisation. It was a nice way of having personal revenges too and teaching people that they could not steal anything with impunity. If we analysed that kind of honour we would find it was principally vanity. The dishonour really lay with the wife, if she deceived her husband--and with the other man if he was the husband's friend--if he was not, his abduction of the woman was not 'dishonourable' because he was not trusted, it was merely an act of theft." "What then must we do when we are very strongly tempted?" Her voice was so low he could hardly hear it. "It is sometimes wisest to run away," and he turned from her and moved towards the door.