ead the
house opened a bright eye at him. He waved back at it with an absurd,
incredible boyishness.

Then he walked on deliberately, firmly.

What was it he had to set his mind on?

Of course. That question of therapeutics----

II

1

"I don't understand it," Christine said. "It seems to me better than
anything you've ever read to me."

She counted her stitches for the second time, and looked up at the sun
that showed its face over the stable roof opposite, as though at a lamp
which did not burn as well as it used to do. In the dusty golden light
she was like a figure in a tapestry. Perhaps in its early days it had
been a trifle crude, a trifle harsh in colour, but now worn and
threadbare, trembling on decay, it had attained a rare and exquisite
beauty.

She smiled back blindly into the little room.

"Don't you think so, Robert?"

Mr. Ricardo also looked at Robert, eagerly, pathetically.

"It was to gain your opinion--reinforce my own judgment--solely for
that purpose--difficult to obtain, the impartial opinion of a trained
mind----"

He had grown into a habit of talking like that--in broken disjointed
sentences, which only Robert and Christine who knew his thoughts could
understand. And now, in the midst of his scattered manuscript he
waited, rubbing his shiny knees with his thin, grey, not very clean
hands.

But Robert looked at Francey. He had sat all the time with his arms
crossed on the oil-clothed table and looked at her, frankly and
unconsciously as a savage or a street boy might have done. He was too
tired to care. He had come straight from giving the limousine
underneath an extra washing down for the Whitsun holidays and oil still
lingered in his nails, and there was a faint forgotten smear of it on
his cheek, and another near the thick upstanding hair where he had
rubbed his hand across. They came as almost humorous relief in a face
in which there were things ten years too old--the harsh and bony
structure showing where there should have been a round boyishness, and
the full mouth set in a fierce, relentless negation of itself. But the
oil smears and the eyes that shone out from under the fair overhanging
brows were again almost too young. They made the strength pathetic.

He, too, sat in the sunlight, which was not kind to his green,
threadbare clothes. But the sun only came into the stable yard for an
hour or two, and as it withdrew itself slowly along the length of th