may throw considerable light
on my 'liking' for Austin. As for what's in _his_ mind, there is
no subject on which I'm in blacker ignorance. And after being so
tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of
interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for
granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this
singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest
intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from
certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from
time to time." As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters,
she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she
had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps
which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray
spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed
above the Chateau, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the
better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was
penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and
thrilled out: "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful! _Here!_"

"There's something _more_ wonderful!" he said, indicating with his
cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed,
lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal
progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at
twenty-five centimes a trip.

She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew
that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aeroplanes. "You
mean," she said appreciatively, "you mean those common people going
freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago--"

He nodded, pleased by her quickness. "Two hundred years from now,"
he conjectured, "the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an
historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary
monarch."

Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she
did.

He lifted his eyebrows. "Relic of a quaint old social structure
inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth
century,"

"Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with
friendly mockery.

"Aye! _Toujours perdrix!_" he admitted. He continued to look steadily
and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden
pulse of premonition, she w