e moved about the hall as she spoke, putting little things to rights.
Then she passed up the circular staircase. At the bend she looked back
and caught him watching her. She waved her hand with a little less than
her usual frankness. Tallente had forgotten for a moment his
whereabouts, his fatigue, his general weariness. He had turned around
in his chair and was watching her. She found something in the very
intensity of his gaze disturbing, vaguely analogous to certain
half-formed thoughts of her own. She called out some light remark,
scoffed at herself, and ran lightly out of sight, calling to her maid as
she went.

CHAPTER VII

Luncheon was served in a small room at the back of the house. Through
the wide-flung French windows was a vista of terraced walks, the two
sunken tennis lawns, a walled garden leading into an orchard, and
beyond, the great wood-hung cleft in the hills, on either side of which
the pastoral fields, like little squares, stretched away upwards. From
here there was no trace of the more barren, unkinder side of the
moorland. The succession of rich colours merged at last into the dim,
pearly hue where sky and cloud met, in the golden haze of the August
heat, a haze more like a sort of transparent filminess than anything
which really obscured.

Lady Jane, whose gift of femininity had triumphed even over her farm
clothes, seemed to Tallente to convey a curiously mingled impression of
restfulness and delicate charm in her cool, white muslin dress, low at
the neck, the Paquin-made garment of an Aphrodite. She talked to him
with all the charm of an accomplished hostess, and yet with the
occasional fascinating reserve of the woman who finds her companion
something more than ordinarily sympathetic. The butler served them
unattended from the sideboard, but before luncheon was half way through
they dispensed with his services.

"I suppose it has occurred to you by this time, Mr. Tallente," she
said, as she watched the coffee in a glass machine by her side, "that I
am a very unconventional person."

"Whatever you are," he replied, "I am grateful for."

"Cryptic, but with quite a nice sort of sound about it," she observed,
smiling. "Tell me honestly, though, aren't you surprised to find me
living here quite alone?"

"It seems to me perfectly natural," he answered.

"I live without a chaperon," she went on, "because a chaperon called by
that name would bore me terribly. As a matter of fact, though,