e earth is round. Who taught you? I am going to bed now, and all the
night, you tell me, you and I and the biscuits go plunging eastwards,
until we reach the sun. But breakfast will be at nine as usual.
Good-night."

She rang the bell twice, and her maid came with her candle and her
walking-stick: it was her habit of late to go to her room as soon as
dinner was over, for she had no one to sit up with. Rickie was impressed
by her loneliness, and also by the mixture in her of insight and
obtuseness. She was so quick, so clear-headed, so imaginative even.
But all the same, she had forgotten what people were like. Finding life
dull, she had dropped lies into it, as a chemist drops a new element
into a solution, hoping that life would thereby sparkle or turn some
beautiful colour. She loved to mislead others, and in the end her
private view of false and true was obscured, and she misled herself. How
she must have enjoyed their errors over Stephen! But her own error had
been greater, inasmuch as it was spiritual entirely.

Leighton came in with some coffee. Feeling it unnecessary to light the
drawing-room lamp for one small young man, he persuaded Rickie to say he
preferred the dining-room. So Rickie sat down by the fire playing with
one of the lumps of chalk. His thoughts went back to the ford, from
which they had scarcely wandered. Still he heard the horse in the
dark drinking, still he saw the mystic rose, and the tunnel dropping
diamonds. He had driven away alone, believing the earth had confirmed
him. He stood behind things at last, and knew that conventions are not
majestic, and that they will not claim us in the end.

As he mused, the chalk slipped from his fingers, and fell on the
coffee-cup, which broke. The china, said Leighton, was expensive. He
believed it was impossible to match it now. Each cup was different. It
was a harlequin set. The saucer, without the cup, was therefore useless.
Would Mr. Elliot please explain to Mrs. Failing how it happened.

Rickie promised he would explain.

He had left Stephen preparing to bathe, and had heard him working
up-stream like an animal, splashing in the shallows, breathing heavily
as he swam the pools; at times reeds snapped, or clods of earth were
pulled in. By the fire he remembered it was again November. "Should you
like a walk?" he asked Leighton, and told him who stopped in the village
tonight. Leighton was pleased. At nine o'clock the two young men left
the house,