all he had sympathetically been closeted with was great
in his mind. Whereas his native delicacy and slow judgment had led him
to keep silent until now towards his host, it was in no wise because
Jimmy had not quite made up his mind that he would not spare Westboro'
at all when the moment, if it ever came, should present itself for him
to speak.

As he rode along he thought of the Duchess naturally in Paris,
surrounded by a train of ardent admirers; she had them always,
everywhere. She was disillusioned, of course, probably angry, piqued,
and unfortunately she had been betrayed; and he shrugged with a gentle
desperation as he made a mental picture of the last scene: the
inevitable divorce, the wrecking of another household,
unless--unless--one of them loved sufficiently to save the situation.

His thoughts came to a standstill as his horse stopped short before a
gate: his riding had fetched him up before it. The mare stretched out
her long neck, set free by a relaxing rein; she sniffed the latch and
put her head over the wicket, and the rider saw that they had come
across fields, and were at the entrance of a deserted property. The
gate gave access to a forest road where the thick underbrush was
untidy, and on whose walk the piles of leaves lay as they had fallen.
He could see no farther in, and thinking to come at the end upon a
forsaken garden, the precincts of an untenanted country house, he
leaned down, tried the gate which fairly swung into his hand, and the
mare passed through. There was the delicious intimacy about the woods
which the sense of coming alone and unexpectedly upon the old and
forsaken gives the traveller. He is a discoverer of secrets, a
legitimate spy upon stories which he flatters himself he is the first
to read. He becomes intimate with another man's past, and as he must
necessarily, in all ignorance, tell himself his own tales, indiscretion
may be said to be a doubtful quantity.

A bit back in the bare brown woods he saw the flash of a marble pillar;
it shone white and clear in the setting of russet and against the boles
of the trees. A little farther away gleamed another figure on its base
of fluted marble, and still farther along, leaf-overlaid and thus
effaced, he could discern the contour of a sunken garden. The place
grew more pretentious as he slowly picked his way, and he was
unprepared for coming suddenly onto a gravel path from which he thought
the leaves had been blown away