uddenness of a revelation. Whatever had been going on in the less
illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been
merely to bid South Harting good-bye-- And in short they would never
understand. They would accuse him of the meanest treachery. He could see
his mother's face, he could hear her voice saying, "And so because of
this sudden infatuation for a swindler's daughter, a girl who runs about
the roads with a couple of retrievers hunting for a man, you must
spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot of pretentious stuffy
lies...." And Mrs. Skelmersdale too would say, "Of course he just talked
of the world and duty and all that rubbish to save my face...."

It wasn't so at all.

But it looked so frightfully like it!

Couldn't they realize that he had fled out of London before ever he had
seen Amanda? They might be able to do it perhaps, but they never would.
It just happened that in the very moment when the edifice of his noble
resolutions had been ready, she had stepped into it--out of nothingness
and nowhere. She wasn't an accident; that was just the point upon which
they were bound to misjudge her; she was an embodiment. If only he could
show her to them as she had first shown herself to him, swift, light, a
little flushed from running but not in the least out of breath, quick
as a leopard upon the dogs.... But even if the improbable opportunity
arose, he perceived it might still be impossible to produce the Amanda
he loved, the Amanda of the fluttering short skirt and the clear
enthusiastic voice. Because, already he knew she was not the only
Amanda. There was another, there might be others, there was this
perplexing person who had flashed into being at the very moment of their
mutual confession, who had produced the entirely disconcerting demand
that nobody must be told. Then Betty had intervened. But that sub-Amanda
and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the first occasion,
because when aristocrats love they don't care a rap who is told and who
is not told. They just step out into the light side by side....

"Don't tell any one," she had said, "not for a few days...."

This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about in
the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda
who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her chin up and
contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was apparently engaged
in disentangling something obscu