“Of course,” he whispered, “she has never been able to make a speech since. How could she? Without her old friend she is just a lovely woman, a lovely woman whose life centres round her care for Captain Fortune. And her old friend has gone out of her life, he who loved her and still loves her, never to return, never....” He rose from his chair and looked miserably down on us. Bravely, he tried to smile. “I am so, so sorry,” murmured Shelmerdene. And silently we watched his tall figure carving a passage through the quality to the doorway. A broken man is a more miserable thing than a broken toy, and we were sad.... The agreeable and polished M. Risotto, prince of _maîtres d’hôtel_, chanced by our table. “Who,” asked Shelmerdene, “was that tall gentleman who has just left us?” “That, madam,” said the agreeable and polished M. Risotto, “is Captain Fortune, the most gallant gentleman in England....” VI: THE ANCIENT SIN I George Tarylon and I were engaged to stay the week-end with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor Hall, which is four hours by car from Hyde Park Corner, though that, of course, rather depends on the kind of car. George Tarlyon’s--as that Armenian fellow had noticed--was a good car, long and low, a chap’s car, and we had run four-fifths of our distance very well: we had flashed through a town, whose name is of no interest, and had plunged into the peculiar wood of Carmion, which shrouds the southern border of the domain of Malmanor. We were therefore on the last lap, and the fact that this lay through Carmion Wood lent a certain interest to it; for although Tarlyon and I had very often stayed with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor, we had never, somehow, really penetrated into Carmion. I don’t know why, but it just hadn’t happened; and George Tarlyon was now running his car along the broad sweep of its central and only road because of a vague idea that it was a short cut as compared to the main road. It was a rotten idea, that of George Tarlyon’s. One of the many silly legends about Carmion Wood is that only foreigners may hear the singing of the birds therein, while for Englishmen there is no sound but the rustling of the leaves and the sighing of the boughs. How that sort of nonsense ever gets hold of a countryside, I don’t know. And the fact that, as George Tarlyon rushed the car along the twilight road--for although it was a bright summer’s day, the leaves are very thick on Carmion trees--we could hear no birds singing was, without a doubt, simply because they were singing somewhere else that afternoon. “Obviously,” I said to Tarlyon, who had suggested that had I had a Spanish mother I could now be enjoying the sweet trilling of rooks and the back-chat of blackbirds, “obviously they can’t always be singing in one place.”