ignity.

"I know on the face of it I have not the smallest right to have taken
possession in this way," she continued. "It is the frankest
impertinence. But if you realised how extremely I am enjoying myself,
you could not fail to forgive me. All this park of yours, all this
nature," she turned sideways, sketching out the great view with a broad
gesture of the cigarette and graceful hand that held it, "all this is
divinely lovely. It is wiser to possess oneself of it in an illicit
manner, to defy the minor social proprieties and unblushingly to steal,
than not to possess oneself of it at all. If you are really hungry, you
know, you learn not to be too nice as to the ways and means of
acquiring sustenance."

"And you were really hungry?" Richard found himself saying, as he
feared rather blunderingly. But he wanted, so anxiously, the present to
remain the present--wanted to continue to watch her, and to hear her.
She turned his head. How then could he behave otherwise than with
stupidity?

"La! la!" she replied, laughing indulgently, and thereby enchanting him
still more; "what must your experience of life be if you suppose one
gets a full meal of divine loveliness every day in the week? For my
part, I am not troubled with any such celestial plethora, believe me. I
was ravening, I tell you, positively ravening."

"And your hunger is satisfied?" he asked, still as he feared
blunderingly, and with a queer inward movement of envy towards the wide
view she looked upon, and the glory of the sunset which dared touch her
hair.

"Satisfied?" she exclaimed. "Is one's hunger for the divinely lovely
ever satisfied? Just now I have stayed mine with the merest
mouthful--as one snatches a sandwich at a railway _buffet_. And
directly I must get into the train again, and go on with my noisy,
dusty, stifling journey. Ah! you are very fortunate to live in this
adorable and restful place; to see it in all its fine drama of changing
colour and season, year in and year out."

She dropped the end of her cigarette into a little sandy depression in
the turf, and drawing aside her silken skirts, trod out the red heart
of it neatly with her daintily shod foot. Just then the other lady, she
of the gray-green gown, came from within the shelter of the Temple, and
stood between the white pillars of the colonnade. Dick's grasp
tightened on the handle of the hunting-crop lying across his thigh.

"Am I so very fortunate?" he said, almost involun