of his
life.

But in the very intensity and ardour of his desire he had learnt more
surely than ever the strange contradictions that made her character. His
accident had increased his own age and so emphasized her youth; she was
ever so young, ever so impulsive; her seriousness was the seriousness of
some very youthful spirit, who, guessing at the terrific difficulty of
life, feels that the only way to surmount it is to close eyes blindly
and leap over the whole of it at once. This was what he knew in his
heart--although he would never have put it into words--as her adorable
priggishness.

She had found her solution and everything must fit into it, but, since
she had finally resolved it, nothing would fit into it at all--and there
was the whole of Rachel's young history!

To Roddy one thing manifest was that a very tiny blunder might shatter
the bond that was forming between them, and it was eloquent of a great
deal that, whereas before in the Nita Raseley episode, it had been
Rachel who feared the one false step, it was now Roddy. What it came to
was that, in spite of everything, he was still unable to prophesy about
her. She was still unrealized, almost untouched by him, that was partly
why he loved her so.

Roddy's brain had been alive last night and ready to grapple with
anything; to-day he felt stupid and confused. "We're in for a jolly good
row," he thought, "far as I can see. There's no avoidin' it. Anyway,
some clearin' up will come out of all of it."

So intent was he upon Rachel that he scarcely considered the Duchess. He
had not very much imagination about people and made the English mistake
of believing that everyone else saw life as he did. He had, for that
very reason, never believed very seriously in the Duchess's passion for
himself; he liked her indeed for her hardness and resented any
appearance of the gentler motions--"She'll like tellin' us all what she
thinks of it"--placed _her_ in the afternoon's battle. He might have
taken it all, had he chosen, as the most curious circumstance, that he
should be "arranging things"--eloquent of the changed order of his life
and of the new man that he was becoming.

He lay there all the morning, nervous and restless--Rachel had looked in
for a moment and had told him that she was going to see Christopher,
that she might not return to luncheon. He had fancied that, in those
few moments, he had divined in her some especial thrill--"We're all
going to be tun