ur; and, when he left, she walked with him to the gate of the woods
and blurted out that she was engaged to Dick Benyon. As he
congratulated her, Eric remembered their last parting by the sun-dial,
when she had told him not to worry even if gossiping papers coupled his
name with Barbara's, when she had pointed out, too, that they could end
the gossip in a day by ceasing to meet. She did not seem extravagantly
happy; each had lost the other without finding the perfect substitute;
but Agnes, with greater wisdom than he had ever shewn towards Barbara,
had resolved that a secondary place was not enough.

After that he avoided the Warings, but Sybil returned one night from Red
Roofs with a report that Jack was expected there within three days. He
had seen a specialist in London and was forbidden to attempt any
brain-work for three months; even the easy experiment in Paris had been
a mistake. Eric's mind was busy with excuses to get back to London, for
with Jack as his neighbour, invalided and bored, it would be necessary
to see him daily. The Lanes were, fortunately, too much absorbed in
their own life to be suspicious of sudden changes in Eric's plans;
affectionate regret greeted his announcement that he was returning to
London after the week-end, and his sense of the dramatic was grimly
amused by the thought that his train would pass Jack's somewhere between
Basingstoke and Brooklands. . . . He might almost be a criminal fleeing
from justice.

A note from Jack lay on his hall table, regretting that they had not
met, but promising to walk over to the Mill-House the moment that he
arrived. It was followed by another, full of mock-indignation.

_"If you don't want to see me, you needn't_," he wrote. "_But for
Heaven's sake don't bolt to the country the minute you hear I'm coming
to London and then bolt back to London the minute you hear I'm going to
the country_."

Of course it was all badinage; and yet, if Jack knew everything, the
badinage might cover an atrocious hint of his knowledge. . . .

"I'm losing my sense of reality!" Eric muttered.

The same post brought him a long letter from his mother. Jack had come
to tea on the day of his arrival looking very well, on the whole, though
the wound on his head was still visible.

"_He wants to see you_," wrote Lady Lane, "_and he particularly asked
when you would be down here again. I'm afraid poor Jack is in for rather
a dull time. He was hoping so much to be well enough