"Because I knew you would like it. You did before, you know. And that
was January." There was one. Another, connected with it, was her going
alone up to the schoolhouse, and her flush of pleasure when Lancelot
said, "Oh, I say, did He bring you down? Good--then we'll go
immediately and see the car; perhaps it's a new one." She could afford
to recall that--after a long interval. They had had a roaring day,
"all over the place," as Lancelot said afterwards to a friend; and
then there had been her parting with Urquhart in the dark at the open
door of Queendon Court. "Aren't you going to stop?" "No, my dear."
She remembered being amused with that. "Aren't you even coming in?" "I
am not. Good-bye. You enjoyed yourself?" "Oh, immensely." "That's what
I like," he had said, and "pushed off," as his own phrase went. Atop
of that, the return to James, and to nothingness. For nothing
happened, except that he had been in a good temper throughout, which
may easily have been because she had been in one herself--until the
Easter holidays, when he had been very cross indeed. Poor James, to
get him to begin to understand Lancelot's bluntness, intensity, and
passion for something or other, did seem hopeless.

They were at Wycross, on her urgent entreaty, and James was bored at
Wycross, she sometimes thought, because she loved it so much.
Jealousy. A man's wife ought to devote herself. She should love
nothing but her husband. He had spent his days at the golf course, not
coming home to lunch. Urquhart was asked for a Sunday--on Lancelot's
account--but couldn't come, or said so at least. Then, on the
Saturday, when he should have been there, James suddenly kissed her in
the garden--and, of course, in the dark.

She hadn't known that he was in the house yet. He had contracted the
habit of having tea at the club-house and talking on till dark. He did
that, as she believed, because she always read to Lancelot in the
evenings: she gave up the holidays entirely to him. Well, Lancelot
that afternoon had been otherwise engaged--with friends of a
neighbour. She had cried off on the score of "seeing something of
Father," at which Lancelot had winked. But James was not in to tea,
and at six--and no sign of him--she yielded to the liquid calling of a
thrush in the thickening lilacs, and had gone out. There she stayed
till it was dark, in a favourite place--a circular garden of her
contriving, with a pond, and a golden privet hedge, so arranged as t