In the lazy punt, that gracious Spring morning, she strove to drive the last week-end from her thoughts. She revelled in the unusual and the audacious. Edgar had gone to Paris on an international conference. Only an ancient and faded Aunt, Lady Lætitia Vardon, a sort of permanent aristocratic caretaker, was in the house; Godfrey the sole guest. And Aunt Lætitia had caught a God-sent cold and was staying in bed. They two had the whole bright day before them, and the scented evening, with never a soul to obtrude on their idyllic communion. She had always snapped her fingers at convention. But, Lady Edna Donnithorpe, chartered libertine, had always observed the terms of her charter, her heart never having tempted her to break them. This delicious breach was a different matter altogether. She had even dared to put off two or three previously invited friends. . . . She told him this while he helped her to chicken and ham. He proclaimed her the most wonderful thing in the world. “Don’t you think I deserve one little day’s holiday in the year? Just a holiday from the talk, talk, talk, the smiling, the wheedling, the scheming, with my brain ever on the alert and seeming to grow bigger and bigger as the night goes on, until it almost bursts my head when I lie down to sleep?” “Why do you do it?” he asked. She shrugged her graceful shoulders. “I don’t know. I used to love it. Now I’m beginning to hate it. I was at a wedding a day or two ago—Charlie Haughton and Minnie Lavering—you know whom I mean, don’t you? They haven’t a sixpence between them—and they looked so happy—oh! so damned happy”—her voice broke adorably—“that I nearly wept.” He neglected his own plateful of chicken and ham and bent forward over the basket between them. “I’d do anything in the wide world to make you happy, Edna.” “I know you would,” she smiled. “You’re doing your best now. It’s an excellent best. But it might be better if you fished out the salt.” While she helped herself daintily from the paper packet which he held out, he laughed, adoring her ever ready trick of switching off the sentimental current. “Now you are really just a little bit happy, aren’t you?” She nodded intimately, which emboldened him to say: “For the life of me I can’t see what induced you to take up with a rotten sort of cripple like me.” “Neither can I,” she replied composedly. “Except perhaps that the rotten cripple is a very brave and distinguished soldier.” “Rubbish!” said Godfrey. “There are hundreds of thousands like me all over the place, as indistinguishable from one another as peas in a peck.” “Won’t you allow a poor woman just a nice sense of discrimination?” “I’ll allow the one woman in the universe,” said Godfrey, “to have everything she pleases.” “Then that’s that,” said Lady Edna.