' had thoroughly enjoyed his guest. He had
asked this woman especially because she charmed him; without forming
the reason he had a latent hope that she might do more than charm. He
wanted to forget and to be eased from the haunting memory that stung
and never soothed. From his first tete-a-tete with Mrs. Falconer he
had at once seen that there was nothing there for him.

Bulstrode had said that Westboro' was not a lover. Reserved as far as
all feeling was concerned, he had made no advances to the beautiful
American, but contented himself with watching her. She could not be in
love with her brutish husband who, out of the week spent at Westboro'
was visible only two days. Then Bulstrode had come. Pictures of the
two talking in the long twilights, riding together, walking on the
terrace side by side, came vividly to Westboro's recollection.

"That," he decided, "is a real flesh-and-blood woman, the kind of woman
I should have married. Bulstrode is a lucky devil."

"A chap," Westboro' said to Jimmy in a mild unpretentious mood of
philosophy, "is, of course, a husband; more naturally than people give
him credit for, a father; but first of all--and that's what so few
women take into consideration--_he is a man_."

The Duke had fallen into the habit of breaking through the silences
when each man, following his own thoughts, would forget the other. And
remarks such as these his companion knew, referred in sense and detail
to the long talks whose intenser personalities had ceased.

This day Westboro' brought out his little paragraph as, between the
hedges of a lowland lane, the two rode at a walk after a long hard
canter from Penhaven, some eight miles behind them on the hill. On
either side the top of the thorn was veiled with rime. Down the
hedge's thickness from his seat on his horse, Bulstrode could look into
the dark tangled interstices of the thicket and its delicious browns
and greens. Into the thorns here and there dried leaves had fallen,
and from the hedge as well as from the country, clouded and gray with
mist, came a sharpened sweetness; a blended smell of fields over which
early winter had passed; a smell of woods over which the fires cast
smoky veils. In the freshness and with the eager exercise, Bulstrode's
cheeks had reddened. He sat his horse well, and his enjoyment of life,
his ease with it, his charming spirit, shone in the face he turned to
the Duke. For some miles given over to the sym