then----"

The horses walked side by side. Honoria stretched out her hand
impulsively, laid it on his arm.

"Richard, Richard, for pity's sake don't! You hurt me too much. It's
terrible to have been the cause of such suffering."

"You weren't the cause," he said. "Lies were the cause, behind which,
like a fool, I'd tried to shelter myself. You've been right, Honoria,
from first to last. What does it matter after all?--Don't take it to
heart. For it's over now--all over, thank God, and I have got back into
normal relations with things and with people."--He looked at her very
charmingly, and spoke with a fine courtesy of tone.--"One way and
another you have taught me a lot, and I am grateful. And, in the
future, though the conditions will be altered, I hope you'll come back
here often, Honoria, and just see for yourself that my mother is
content; and give my schemes and fads a kindly look in at the same
time. And perhaps give me a trifle of sound advice. I shall need it
safe enough. You see what I want to get at is temperance--temperance
all round, towards everything and everybody--not fanaticism, which, in
some respects, is a much easier attitute of mind."

Richard looked up into the whispering, green tide overhead.

"Yes, one must deny oneself the luxury of fanaticism, if possible," he
said, "deny oneself the vanity of eccentricity. One must take
everything simply, just in the day's work. One must keep in touch. Keep
in touch with your world, the great world, the world which cultivates
pleasure and incidentally makes history, as well as with the world of
the dust-cart--I know that well enough--if one's to be quite sane. You
see loneliness, a loneliness of which I am thankful to think you can
form no conception, is the curse of persons like myself. It inclines
one to hide, to sulk, to shut oneself away and become misanthropic. To
hug one's misery becomes one's chiefest pleasure--to nurse one's grief,
one's sense of injury. Oh! I'm wary, very wary now, I tell you," he
added, half laughing. "I know all the insidious temptations, the tricks
and frauds, and pitfalls of this affair. And so I'll continue to go to
Grimshott garden parties as discipline now and then, while I gather my
disabled and decrepit family very closely about me and say words of
wisdom to it--wisdom derived from a mature and extensive personal
experience."

There was a pause before Miss St. Quentin spoke. Then she said slowly.

"And you refuse to l