edescending the steps.
'Then round here, please.'

She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxation of nerve
and will which for the moment had something intoxicating in it.

'There are your phloxes,' she said, stopping before a splendid line of
plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again; her spirits
rose at a bound. 'I don't know why you admire them so much. They have no
scent, and they are only pretty in the lump,' and she broke off a spike
of blossom, studied it a little disdainfully, and threw it away.

He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it was
intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange face.

'Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more than usual,' he
said. 'After this morning it will be so long before I see the true
country again.'

He looked, smiling, round on the blue and white brilliance of the sky,
clear again after a night of rain; on the sloping garden, on the
village beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close beside them, with its
blooms

'On tiptoe for a flight,
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white.'

'Oh! Oxford is countrified enough,' she said indifferently, moving down
the broad grass-path which divided the garden into two equal portions.

'But I am leaving Oxford, at any rate for a year,' he said quietly. 'I
am going to London.'

Her delicate eyebrows went up. 'To London?' Then, in a tone of mock
meekness and sympathy, 'How you will dislike it!'

'Dislike it--why?'

'Oh! because--' she hesitated, and then laughed her daring girlish
laugh--'because there are so many stupid people in London; the clever
people are not all picked out like prize apples, as I suppose they are
in Oxford.'

'At Oxford?' repeated Langham, with a kind of groan. 'At Oxford? You
imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by clever people?'

'I can only judge by what I see,' she said demurely. 'Every Oxford man
always behaves as if he were the cream of the universe. Oh! I don't mean
to be rude,' she cried, losing for a moment her defiant control over
herself, as though afraid of having gone too far. 'I am not the least
disrespectful, really. When you and Robert talk, Catherine and I feel
quite as humble as we ought.'

The words were hardly out before she could have bitten the tongue that
spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscretions of Sunday night as
she deserved to feel them, and now after three minutes con