.

She came out to him on the verandah. From the clasp of her hand, thin
and faintly browned--the hand of a woman never quite idle--he felt that
she relied on him to understand and sympathize; and nothing so awakened
the best in Courtier as such mute appeals to his protection. He said
gently:

"Don't let them think you're down;" and, squeezing her hand hard: "Why
should you be wasted like this? It's a sin and shame!"

But he stopped in what he felt to be an unlucky speech at sight of her
face, which without movement expressed so much more than his words. He
was protesting as a civilized man; her face was the protest of Nature,
the soundless declaration of beauty wasted against its will, beauty that
was life's invitation to the embrace which gave life birth.

"I'm clearing out, myself," he said: "You and I, you know, are not good
for these people. No birds of freedom allowed!"

Pressing his hand, she turned away into the house, leaving Courtier
gazing at the patch of air where her white figure had stood. He had
always had a special protective feeling for Audrey Noel, a feeling which
with but little encouragement might have become something warmer. But
since she had been placed in her anomalous position, he would not for the
world have brushed the dew off her belief that she could trust him. And,
now that he had fixed his own gaze elsewhere, and she was in this bitter
trouble, he felt on her account the rancour that a brother feels when
Justice and Pity have conspired to flout his sister. The voice of Frith
the chauffeur roused him from gloomy reverie.

"Lady Barbara, sir!"

Following the man's eyes, Courtier saw against the sky-line on the for
above Ashman's Folly, an equestrian statue. He stopped the car at once,
and got out.

He reached her at the ruin, screened from the road, by that divine chance
which attends on men who take care that it shall. He could not tell
whether she knew of his approach, and he would have given all he had,
which was not much, to have seen through the stiff grey of her coat, and
the soft cream of her body, into that mysterious cave, her heart. To
have been for a moment, like Ashman, done for good and all with material
things, and living the white life where are no barriers between man and
woman. The smile on her lips so baffled him, puffed there by her spirit,
as a first flower is puffed through the sur face of earth to mock at the
spring winds. How tell what it signif