except for a
carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves
were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.
And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the
world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love
had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations
with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the
curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.

On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised
to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with
an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that
was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.

Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in
the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the
summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars
and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been
aviating or travelling.

Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him "Pip,"
and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, "Pip!" And
then he called her "Amanda." When the Wilder girls came up to join the
tennis he was just as brotherly....

The next day he came to lunch.

During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before
of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They
watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at
once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind
of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably
suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon
Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up
and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he
could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.

They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage
of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.

"Mrs. Benham," he said, "looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
don't you think?"

"Yes," said Benham, startled. "Yes. She certainly keeps very well."

"She misses you terribly," said Sir Philip; "it is