“I was thinking of the chair of Romance at the School of Literature,” said he, “but I should be sorry to interfere with your prospects if you have an eye on it also.” He rose as Lady Severn came up by the side of Mr. Shirley. Mr. Shirley expressed the hope that Miss Severn had not been bored. She looked so absorbed in whatever tale of the bush Mr. Winwood had been telling her that he felt sure she was being bored, he said. (The people to whom Mr. Shirley was obliged to be polite were so numerous that he felt quite a relaxation in being impolite--when he could be so with impunity--now and again.) “I never was bored in my life, Mr. Shirley,” said Amber. “Bores are the only people that are ever bored. When I hear a man complain that he has been bored I know perfectly well that what he means is that he hasn’t had all the chances he looked for of boring other people.” “I think we must look for our wraps,” said Lady Severn. “It’s quite time: they’re beginning to light the Chinese lanterns,” said Guy. CHAPTER XII It was while the Australian was telling Amber the story which had interested her so greatly that Ernest Clifton was listening to something that Josephine had to say to him--something that caused him a good deal of spare thought all the time he was driving to his rooms in St. James’s Street, and even after he had settled himself in his chair with a small tumbler half filled with Apollinaris on a table at his elbow. The words that she had spoken to him at that time of soft sounds and lights and garden scents were not such as he had been accustomed to hear from her; though he could not but acknowledge to himself--he now and again acknowledged something to himself; never to any one else--that he had noticed signs of readiness on her part to say those very words. It had needed all his adroitness--and he had usually a pretty fair share at his command--to prevent her from saying them long ago. “_I wonder if you know how great a strain it is upon me to adhere to the compact which we made last year._” Those were the words that she had spoken in his ear when the Terrace had become almost deserted, only Amber and Pierce Win wood remaining in the seats they had occupied while drinking their coffee, and she had spoken in so low a tone that, even with the band playing so soft and low as it was, no word could be heard by any one passing their chairs. He had been slightly startled by her words--he thought now that he had time to think over the matter, that perhaps he should have seemed when in her presence to have been more startled than he actually was. But the fact was that he had been so startled as to be unable to discriminate exactly how startled he should seem.