n and look after your friends. They'll wonder what has become of you."

"All right."

He was glad to leave her.

The quarrel was quickly followed by a reconciliation, but the few days
that remained were sometimes irksome to Philip. He wanted to talk of
nothing but the future, and the future invariably reduced Miss Wilkinson
to tears. At first her weeping affected him, and feeling himself a beast
he redoubled his protestations of undying passion; but now it irritated
him: it would have been all very well if she had been a girl, but it was
silly of a grown-up woman to cry so much. She never ceased reminding him
that he was under a debt of gratitude to her which he could never repay.
He was willing to acknowledge this since she made a point of it, but he
did not really know why he should be any more grateful to her than she to
him. He was expected to show his sense of obligation in ways which were
rather a nuisance: he had been a good deal used to solitude, and it was a
necessity to him sometimes; but Miss Wilkinson looked upon it as an
unkindness if he was not always at her beck and call. The Miss O'Connors
asked them both to tea, and Philip would have liked to go, but Miss
Wilkinson said she only had five days more and wanted him entirely to
herself. It was flattering, but a bore. Miss Wilkinson told him stories of
the exquisite delicacy of Frenchmen when they stood in the same relation
to fair ladies as he to Miss Wilkinson. She praised their courtesy, their
passion for self-sacrifice, their perfect tact. Miss Wilkinson seemed to
want a great deal.

Philip listened to her enumeration of the qualities which must be
possessed by the perfect lover, and he could not help feeling a certain
satisfaction that she lived in Berlin.

"You will write to me, won't you? Write to me every day. I want to know
everything you're doing. You must keep nothing from me."

"I shall be awfully, busy" he answered. "I'll write as often as I can."

She flung her arms passionately round his neck. He was embarrassed
sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection. He would have preferred
her to be more passive. It shocked him a little that she should give him
so marked a lead: it did not tally altogether with his prepossessions
about the modesty of the feminine temperament.

At length the day came on which Miss Wilkinson was to go, and she came
down to breakfast, pale and subdued, in a serviceable travelling dress of
black and white check