sly, yet very gently.

Helen continued to look at him, and as she did so her cheek rounded,
her mouth grew soft, the vertical line faded out from her
forehead.--"You are very assuaging, Cousin Richard," she said, and she
too laughed softly.

"Understands the vineries very well though," Lord Fallowfeild was
saying; "and doesn't grow bad peaches, not at all bad peaches, but is
stupid about flowers. He ought to retire. Never shall have really
satisfactory gardens till he does retire. And yet I haven't the heart
to tell him to go. Good fellow, you know, good, honest, hard-working
fellow, and had a lot of trouble. Wife ailing for years, always ailing,
and youngest child got hip disease--nasty thing hip disease, very
nasty--quite a cripple, poor little creature, I am afraid a hopeless
cripple. Terrible anxiety and burden for parents in that rank of life,
you know."

"It can hardly be otherwise in any rank of life," Lady Calmady said
slowly, bitterly. An immense weariness was upon her--weariness of the
actual and present, weariness of the possible and the future. Her
courage ebbed. She longed to go away, to be alone for a while, to shut
eyes and ears, to deaden alike perception and memory, to have it all
cease. Then it was as though those two beautiful, and now laughing,
faces of man and woman in the glory of their youth, seen over the
perspective of fair, white damask, glittering glass and silver, rich
dishes, graceful profusion of flowers and fruit, at the far end of the
avenue of guests, mocked at her. Did they not mock at the essential
conditions of their own lives too? Katherine feared, consciously or
unconsciously they did that. Her weariness dragged upon her with almost
despairing weight.

"Do you get your papers the same day here, Sir Richard?" Lady Louisa
asked imperatively.

"Yes, they come with the second post letters, about five o'clock,"
Julius March answered.

But Lady Louisa Barking intended to be attended to by her host.

"Sir Richard," she paused, "I am asking whether your papers reach you
the same day?"

And Dickie replied he knew not what, for he had just registered the
discovery that barriers are quite useless against a certain sort of
intimacy. Be the crowd never so thick about you, in a sense at least,
you are always alone, exquisitely, delicately, alone with the person
you love.

CHAPTER VIII

RICHARD PUTS HIS HAND TO A PLOUGH FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK

"Dearest mother,