t seem to
her to be entirely confined to their wants.

St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she
answered travelling Europeans--correctly, concisely, and without any
frills of vocabulary. It was quite possible, she reflected, that St.
John wanted to know the answers to his questions. That was the worst of
being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it
bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that
it bored you to tell. Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality
of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.

St. John was explaining what a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her,
it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and
to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to
feel that the land belonged to you--to see your own flowers growing,
your own calves being born--to feel yourself surrounded by your own
people, for whose happiness and welfare you were responsible.

Ariadne said that inheritance was a sacred trust (it was wonderful how
easy she found it to talk like St. John).

"Yes," he said, "that is just it--a sacred trust. Why, I hardly ever go
up to London now, and when I do, I feel quite homesick till I get here
again."

They got up from dinner.

"Shall we go and sit in the library?" he said.

They sat one on either side of the fire. She felt like an ancestress or
a family portrait. The rosy haze of her tea-gown looked strange and
alien fluttering in the huge leather armchair.

"What a wisp you look," St. John said. She remembered how satisfactory
her tininess had always been to him. "I think I could blow you away with
a puff of smoke."

"I am a limpet really," she laughed, "think how I have stuck to your
life."

"Thank God," he affirmed fervently.

"Are you still a great flirt, St. John?"

He looked at her in amazement.

"You have surely not forgotten the way you played fast and loose with
me?"

"Ariadne," he was using the firm voice she knew so well, "you mustn't
talk like that."

"But you did. Don't you remember that dinner you gave when we went to
the L----'s ball and you never danced with me till seventeen minutes
past one?"

"My dear, I was saving you up. The joy after all the duties."

"You never told me so."

"There were a lot of things I never told you."

"I tried so hard to make you."

"It was so hard not to."

"St. John," she s