dinner, for he was sitting, duskily indistinct,
against the light, with a voice coming out to him. The candles had not
been brought in, and the view one saw through the big plate glass window
behind him was very clear and splendid. Those little Wealden hills in
Surrey and Sussex assume at times, for all that by Swiss standards they
are the merest ridges of earth, the dignity and mystery of great
mountains. Now, the crests of Hindhead and Blackdown, purple black
against the level gold of the evening sky, might have been some
high-flung boundary chain. Nearer there gathered banks and pools of
luminous lavender-tinted mist out of which hills of pinewood rose like
islands out of the sea. The intervening spaces were magnified to
continental dimensions. And the closer lowlier things over which we
looked, the cottages below us, were grey and black and dim, pierced by a
few luminous orange windows and with a solitary street lamp shining like
a star; the village might have been nestling a mountain's height below
instead of a couple of hundred feet.

I left my hearthrug, and walked to the window to survey this.

"Who's got all that land stretching away there; that little blunted
sierra of pines and escarpments I mean?"

My father halted for an instant in his answer, and glanced over his
shoulder.

"Wardingham and Baxter share all those coppices," he remarked. "They
come up to my corner on each side."

"But the dark heather and pine land beyond. With just the gables of a
house among the trees."

"Oh? _that_," he said with a careful note of indifference.
"That's--Justin. You know Justin. He used to come to Burnmore Park."

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

LADY MARY JUSTIN

Sec. 1

I did not see Lady Mary Justin for nearly seven months after my return
to England. Of course I had known that a meeting was inevitable, and I
had taken that very carefully into consideration before I decided to
leave South Africa. But many things had happened to me during those
crowded years, so that it seemed possible that that former magic would
no longer sway and distress me. Not only had new imaginative interests
taken hold of me but--I had parted from adolescence. I was a man. I had
been through a great war, seen death abundantly, seen hardship and
passion, and known hunger and shame and desire. A hundred disillusioning
revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when
we were taking some people to the concentration cam