ss but
with such absence of mind that Katharine's catastrophe was in a fair
way to be fulfilled. In putting the matter straight no greetings
were exchanged, but Rodney and Cassandra chose seats as far apart as
possible, and sat down with an air of people making a very temporary
lodgment. Either Mrs. Hilbery was impervious to their discomfort,
or chose to ignore it, or thought it high time that the subject was
changed, for she did nothing but talk about Shakespeare's tomb.

"So much earth and so much water and that sublime spirit brooding over
it all," she mused, and went on to sing her strange, half-earthly song
of dawns and sunsets, of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of noble
loving which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and one age is
linked with another, and no one dies, and we all meet in spirit, until
she appeared oblivious of any one in the room. But suddenly her remarks
seemed to contract the enormously wide circle in which they were soaring
and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon matters of more immediate
moment.

"Katharine and Ralph," she said, as if to try the sound. "William and
Cassandra."

"I feel myself in an entirely false position," said William desperately,
thrusting himself into this breach in her reflections. "I've no right to
be sitting here. Mr. Hilbery told me yesterday to leave the house. I'd
no intention of coming back again. I shall now--"

"I feel the same too," Cassandra interrupted. "After what Uncle Trevor
said to me last night--"

"I have put you into a most odious position," Rodney went on, rising
from his seat, in which movement he was imitated simultaneously by
Cassandra. "Until I have your father's consent I have no right to
speak to you--let alone in this house, where my conduct"--he looked
at Katharine, stammered, and fell silent--"where my conduct has been
reprehensible and inexcusable in the extreme," he forced himself
to continue. "I have explained everything to your mother. She is so
generous as to try and make me believe that I have done no harm--you
have convinced her that my behavior, selfish and weak as it was--selfish
and weak--" he repeated, like a speaker who has lost his notes.

Two emotions seemed to be struggling in Katharine; one the desire to
laugh at the ridiculous spectacle of William making her a formal
speech across the tea-table, the other a desire to weep at the sight of
something childlike and honest in him which touched her inexpressi