were so lonely but for her boy. She and Victoria Tatham had made friends
on the warm soil of Italy, and through a third person, a rare and
charming woman, whose death had first made them really known to each
other.

"I never saw anything so attractive!" Mrs. Manisty was murmuring in
Tatham's ear.

He followed the direction of her eyes, and his fair skin reddened.

"She is very pretty, isn't she?"

"Very--like a Verrocchio angel--who has been to college! She is an
artist?"

"She paints. She admires Delorme."

"That one can see. And he admires her!"

"We--my mother--wants him to paint her."

"He will--if he knows his own business."

"A Miss Penfold?" said Lady Barbara, putting up her eyeglass. "You say
she paints. The modern girl must always _do_ something! _My_ girls have
been brought up for _home_."

A remark that drove Tatham into a rash defence of the modern girl to
which he was quite unequal, and in which indeed he was half-hearted, for
his fundamental ideas were quite as old-fashioned as Lady Barbara's. But
Lydia, for him, was of no date; only charm itself, one with all the magic
and grace that had ever been in the world, or would be.

Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him--a bright, signalling look,
only to tell him how hugely well she was getting on with Delorme. He
smiled in return, but inwardly he was discontented. Always this gay
camaraderie--like a boy's. Not the slightest tremor in it. Not a touch of
consciousness--or of sex. He could not indeed have put it so. All he knew
was that he was always thirstily seeking something she showed no signs of
giving him.

But he himself was being rapidly swept off his feet. Since their meeting
at Threlfall, which had been interrupted by Melrose's freakish return,
there had been other meetings, as delightful as before, yet no more
conclusive or encouraging. He and Lydia had indeed grown intimate. He had
revealed to her thoughts and feelings which he had unveiled for no one
else--not even for Victoria--since he was a boy at school with boyish
friendships. And she had handled them with such delicacy, such sweetness;
such frankness too, in return as to her own "ideas," those stubborn
intractable ideas, which made him frown to think of. Yet all the time--he
knew it--there had been no flirting on her part. Never had she given him
the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she
had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from b