ich she never took."

"Forgive me," he said. "You must remember that I am still her lover."
They had reached the tree that leant a little forward beyond its fellows,
and he had halted and turned so that he was facing her. "Did she and
your father get on together. Was she happy?"

"I don't think she was happy," answered Joan. "She was at first. As a
child, I can remember her singing and laughing about the house, and she
liked always to have people about her. Until her illness came. It
changed her very much. But my father was gentleness itself, to the end."

They had resumed their stroll. It seemed to her that he looked at her
once or twice a little oddly without speaking. "What caused your
mother's illness?" he asked, abruptly.

The question troubled her. It struck her with a pang of self-reproach
that she had always been indifferent to her mother's illness, regarding
it as more or less imaginary. "It was mental rather than physical, I
think," she answered. "I never knew what brought it about."

Again he looked at her with that odd, inquisitive expression. "She never
got over it?" he asked.

"Oh, there were times," answered Joan, "when she was more like her old
self again. But I don't think she ever quite got over it. Unless it was
towards the end," she added. "They told me she seemed much better for a
little while before she died. I was away at Cambridge at the time."

"Poor dear lady," he said, "all those years! And poor Jack Allway." He
seemed to be talking to himself. Suddenly he turned to her. "How is the
dear fellow?" he asked.

Again the question troubled her. She had not seen her father since that
week-end, nearly six months ago, when she had ran down to see him because
she wanted something from him. "He felt my mother's death very deeply,"
she answered. "But he's well enough in health."

"Remember me to him," he said. "And tell him I thank him for all those
years of love and gentleness. I don't think he will be offended."

He drove her back to Paris, and she promised to come and see him in his
studio and let him introduce her to his artist friends.

"I shall try to win you over, I warn you," he said. "Politics will never
reform the world. They appeal only to men's passions and hatreds. They
divide us. It is Art that is going to civilize mankind; broaden his
sympathies. Art speaks to him the common language of his loves, his
dreams, reveals to him the universal kinship."