'I was, enormously. But it's great and merciful, all the same. That's all. Oh no, one thing more. Bertie, I think your girl is worth the rest of this continent. News? Yes, news from Davos. Charlie is better, ever so much better, and his nurse throughout has been Sybil. In fact, there is going to be love in a cottage, I think. Charlie writes. He seems to like the idea of a cottage.' 'She's going to marry him?' asked Bertie. Ginger smiled. 'Now I come to think of it, he doesn't mention the word,' he observed. 'You're rather coarse,' remarked Bertie. 'I am. I thought it might cheer you up. You look rather down. Anything wrong?' 'Nothing whatever.' Ginger strolled back to his chair, put his whisky on one arm, a little heap of cigarettes on the other, and curled himself up between them. 'The young folk are all growing up and being married,' he said. 'It makes me feel extremely old, and it is a little uncomfortable. I've done nothing--but that might happen to anybody--and I've felt nothing. What is it like to feel things, Bertie?' 'Depends what they are.' 'No, I mean independently of what they are. I don't know what strong emotion is. I don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. I am much interested in many things, but impersonally. Now, you--you have adored, and you have been adored. I have sat and looked on. Does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?' Bertie considered this a moment. 'You never cease to feel things,' he said. 'A thing that has been exquisitely sweet becomes bitter, and continues bitter. You taste the jam first, and the powder afterwards.' He turned to the mantelpiece, took up a cigarette, and then, with a sudden trembling hand, threw it into the grate. 'And you pay for it all,' he said--' you pay over and over again. Good-night, Ginger.' CHAPTER XV It was a glorious blue and golden morning in early June, and the soft brilliant sunshine of English summer weather flooded the glades of the park at Molesworth, where Amelie, intent on the finishing of a water-colour sketch, sat on a fallen tree-trunk, and Bertie lay on the grass by her side reading at intervals to her from a volume of Tennyson he had brought out with him. She was almost too busy with her painting to follow very clearly what he read, but the sound of his voice thrilled her with a big, quiet happiness, and when he was silent, the consciousness of his presence by her was hardly less vivid. All the same, she was attending very closely to what she was doing, and her brush industriously recorded what the upward sweep of her gray eyes had noted before she bent them again with bowed head on her sketch.