entrate her
attention, and failed. In vain did she repeat: "But I've been through
this sort of thing before." She had never been through it; the big
machinery, as opposed to the little, had been set in motion, and the
idea that Mr. Wilcox loved, obsessed her before she came to love him in
return.

She would come to no decision yet. "Oh, sir, this is so sudden"--that
prudish phrase exactly expressed her when her time came. Premonitions
are not preparation. She must examine more closely her own nature and
his; she must talk it over judicially with Helen. It had been a strange
love-scene--the central radiance unacknowledged from first to last. She,
in his place, would have said Ich liebe dich, but perhaps it was not
his habit to open the heart. He might have done it if she had pressed
him--as a matter of duty, perhaps; England expects every man to open
his heart once; but the effort would have jarred him, and never, if
she could avoid it, should he lose those defences that he had chosen to
raise against the world. He must never be bothered with emotional talk,
or with a display of sympathy. He was an elderly man now, and it would
be futile and impudent to correct him.

Mrs. Wilcox strayed in and out, ever a welcome ghost; surveying the
scene, thought Margaret, without one hint of bitterness.

CHAPTER XIX

If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course
would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and
stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system
after system of our island would roll together under his feet. Beneath
him is the valley of the Frome, and all the wild lands that come tossing
down from Dorchester, black and gold, to mirror their gorse in the
expanses of Poole. The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable
stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne--the Stour, sliding out of
fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christ church. The
valley of the Avon--invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may
see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond
that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the
glorious downs of Central England. Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth's
ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean,
for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to
the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City's trail! But the
cl