sense of
embarrassment. It was a clear October day, the glen was dry, and the air
under the shadow of the thinning trees was full of the soft light of the
late autumn.

"Ah, this is better," said his lordship.

He lit a cigar and walked for some time by my side without speaking,
merely flicking the seeding heads off the dying thistles with his
walking stick, and then ruckling it through the withered leaves with
which the path was strewn.

But half way up the glen he began to look aslant at me through his
monocle, and then to talk about my life in Rome, wondering how I could
have been content to stay so long at the Convent, and hinting at a
rumour which had reached him that I had actually wished to stay there
altogether.

"Extraordinary! 'Pon my word, extraordinary! It's well enough for women
who have suffered shipwreck in their lives to live in such places, but
for a young gal with any fortune, any looks . . . why I wonder she
doesn't die of _ennui_."

I was still too nervous and embarrassed to make much protest, so he went
on to tell me with what difficulty he supported the boredom of his own
life even in London, with its clubs, its race-meetings, its dances, its
theatres and music halls, and the amusement to be got out of some of the
ladies of society, not to speak of certain well-known professional
beauties.

One of his great friends--his name was Eastcliff--was going to marry the
most famous of the latter class (a foreign dancer at the "Empire"), and
since he was rich and could afford to please himself, why shouldn't he?

When we reached the waterfall at the top of the glen (it had been the
North Cape of Martin Conrad), we sat on a rustic seat which stands
there, and then, to my still deeper embarrassment, his lordship's
conversation came to close quarters.

Throwing away his cigar and taking his silver-haired terrier on his lap
he said:

"Of course you know what the business is which the gentlemen are
discussing in the library?"

As well as I could for the nervousness that was stifling me, I answered
that I knew.

He stroked the dog with one hand, prodded his stick into the gravel with
the other, and said:

"Well, I don't know what your views about marriage are. Mine, I may say,
are liberal."

I listened without attempting to reply.

"I think nine-tenths of the trouble that attends married life--the
breakdowns and what not--come of an irrational effort to tighten the
marriage knot."

Still I