th fluffy freedom.
Though she could not see herself, she appreciated her appearance, swaying
along like that, past lonely trees and houses. A pity there was no one
to see her in that round of Regent's Park, which took her the best part
of an hour, walking in meditation, enjoying the colour coming back into
the world, as if especially for her.

There was character in Leila Lynch, and she had lived an interesting life
from a certain point of view. In her girlhood she had fluttered the
hearts of many besides Cousin Edward Pierson, and at eighteen had made a
passionate love match with a good-looking young Indian civilian, named
Fane. They had loved each other to a standstill in twelve months. Then
had begun five years of petulance, boredom, and growing cynicism, with
increasing spells of Simla, and voyages home for her health which was
really harmed by the heat. All had culminated, of course, in another
passion for a rifleman called Lynch. Divorce had followed, remarriage,
and then the Boer War, in which he had been badly wounded. She had gone
out and nursed him back to half his robust health, and, at twenty-eight,
taken up life with him on an up-country farm in Cape Colony. This middle
period had lasted ten years, between the lonely farm and an old Dutch
house at High Constantia. Lynch was not a bad fellow, but, like most
soldiers of the old Army, had been quite carefully divested of an
aesthetic sense. And it was Leila's misfortune to have moments when
aesthetic sense seemed necessary. She had struggled to overcome this
weakness, and that other weakness of hers--a liking for men's admiration;
but there had certainly been intervals when she had not properly
succeeded. Her acquaintance with Jimmy Fort had occurred during one of
these intervals, and when he went back to England so abruptly, she had
been feeling very tenderly towards him. She still remembered him with a
certain pleasure. Before Lynch died, these "intervals" had been
interrupted by a spell of returning warmth for the invalided man to whom
she had joined her life under the romantic conditions of divorce. He had
failed, of course, as a farmer, and his death left her with nothing but
her own settled income of a hundred and fifty pounds a year. Faced by
the prospect of having almost to make her living, at thirty-eight, she
felt but momentary dismay--for she had real pluck. Like many who have
played with amateur theatricals, she fancied herself as a