"I wonder why on earth I invented that headache," thought Aliette, as she and Mollie tramped down the drive. Hector had returned to work in the library; he waved them au revoir from the desk by the window.

A fantasy came to her: "I shall never see Hector again." She said to herself: "I hope he hasn't gone back to town." She said to herself: "Aliette, don't be an absolute idiot."

For, after all, could anything be more idiotic than that a woman of nearly thirty--and that woman Mrs. Brunton, Mrs. Hector Brunton, wife of Hector Brunton, K.C.--should feel like--like a schoolgirl going to meet her first choir-boy?

And yet, instinctively, Aliette knew herself somehow caught, somehow entangled. No escape from that knowledge! Ridiculous or not, this stranger she was going to meet--of course they would meet him; he couldn't have gone back to town--interested her. Interested her enormously. She saw him again in the eyes of her mind, his serious face, his blue eyes, his hair--such curious hair, goldy-gray as though bleached by the tropics,--all the while she swung, listening to Mollie's chatter, along the familiar lanes.

A low sun, emerging from between gold-edged clouds, shone on them walking. The hedges dripped cool sparkles. Cow-parsley pushed its feathery green through the tangled grass of the ditches. They topped the rise by Moor Farm, and saw Key Hatch below them. It lay in a cup of the valley, gray and brown and slate-blue through leafless branches against the concave jade of pasture-land. Half a mile on, midway between them and the village, two figures strolled up-hill.

Social sense, banishing idiotic fantasies, reasserted itself in Hector Brunton's wife; and, five minutes later, the four figures met.

"How do you do, Mrs. Brunton?"

"How do you do, Mr. Cavendish?"

Ronnie introduced his friend; Aliette introduced them both to Mollie.

The friend, James Wilberforce, carried his five feet eleven well. He had broad shoulders and a rather clever face, aquiline of nose, brown-eyed, high cheek-boned, full-lipped under a "toothbrushed" mustache. His mustache and his hair only just escaped being carroty. His voice carried a faint suggestion of superciliousness.

"An overworked solicitor," he told them with a humorous twinkle of his brown eyes, "taking a day off in the country." He was "charmed" to meet Mrs. Brunton. He had had the pleasure of knowing her husband for some years. "A great man."

Mollie liked the way he spoke. She thought him much more agreeable than Mr. Cavendish, who appeared to her rather a sobersides--almost ill at ease, in fact.

"We were just having a stroll before tea," announced Wilberforce, after about five minutes of uninspired conversation.

"And we are going to have tea at the Bull before church," retorted the girl. "So we'd better all have tea together." She marched Wilberforce off down the hill.

Her sister and Cavendish followed slowly. Now that they had actually met, Aliette felt thoroughly ashamed of the mental fuss she had made about him. He was a perfectly ordinary man, who happened to have given her a lead over Parson's Brook. Rather a nice man, of course. She liked the way he wore his clothes, his assumption that she did not require him to chatter. He walked--she noticed in the gathering twilight--almost as well as he rode, easily from the hips.

"You've let your pipe out," she told him.

He stopped to rekindle it; and she saw that his hand trembled ever so slightly in the glow of the match. "Nervy," she thought. She did not divine that the long scholarly fingers trembled because the man had scarcely slept for overmuch thinking of the woman at his side; that he had been saying to himself, ever since he espied her on the brow of the hill, "Don't be a fool. Don't be a damn fool. She's Hector Brunton's wife."

That afternoon her sheer physical beauty thrilled him like fine poetry. He had no idea how she was dressed. Her clothes seemed part of her--deep wallflower brown, the color of her eyes. He wanted to acknowledge her beauty, to say: "You're wonderful; too wonderful for any man's sight." Actually, he opined that they had had a jolly run, and hoped he'd get another day with the Mid-Oxfordshire some time or other.

On horseback he could thrust with the best of them, this long, loose-limbed young man with the serious face above the Wixton chin; but he was no thruster after women. Too much the poet for that--one of those many dumb poets who have no desire to flaunt their emotions in cold print.

The four came down the hill, Mollie and Wilberforce still leading, round a whitewashed farmhouse, along a strip of wet road whereon a few bowler-hatted chawbacons strolled arm-in-arm with their red-cheeked, silent Dollies, under leafless elm branches, into the main--and only--street of Key Hatch.

England's Sabbath brooded obviously over stone cottages, picturesquely inefficient, flower-pots blocking their tiny windows, doors closed. Already, here and there behind the flower-pots, an extravagant light twinkled. Half-way down the street, its bow-windows inhospitably blinded, stood the Bull, relic of posting-days, whose rusty signboard had so far failed to attract the motorist. At street-end, dark against the cold cloud-banks of declining day, loomed the square tower of Key Hatch Church.

Mollie and Wilberforce waited at the side door of the inn till the others joined them.

"You won't mind having tea in my sitting-room. I'm afraid there isn't a fire anywhere else," said Cavendish; and led his three guests down a narrow corridor--rigid fish in glass cases and an iron hatstand its only decorations--into a parlor where firelight danced invitingly.

Wilberforce lit the lamp, revealing a five-legged tea-table set for two, a hard sofa, three antimacassared chairs, a stuffed barn-owl between Britannia-ware candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the usual litter of photographs in sea-shell frames without which no English inn considers itself furnished.

Cavendish jerked the bell-tassel; Mrs. Wiggins, a pleasant-featured young woman already attired for church-going, bustled in with the brown teapot; nearly courtesied to Aliette; bustled out again, and reappeared with the extra utensils.

"You'll pour out for us, won't you, Mrs. Brunton?" asked the host.

"If you like." Aliette spoke in her usual deliberate way. But now, for the first time, she felt self-conscious. Was her hat on straight? Had she remembered to powder her nose before starting?

Pouring tea, handing cups, busied with the most ordinary social duties, there swept over her mind the most extraordinary fantasies. And quite suddenly she wanted to take off her hat!

"But this is ridiculous," she said to herself. "I can't take off my hat." Nevertheless she wanted to. She must! This was his room. His cap lay on the sofa, his pipe on the mantelpiece. Therefore ... She realized with amazement that her hands were already raised to her head.

"Alie, you haven't given me any sugar." Her sister's irritated voice dispelled the moment's illusion. One hand dropped to her lap, the other to the sugar-tongs.

"Sorry, dear." She recognized the shyness in her own words, and covered shyness with a conventional laugh, "I'm getting forgetful in my old age."

Discussing ages with their bread and butter, they made the original discovery that a woman is as old as she looks, et cetera. Over hunks of Mrs. Wiggins's home-made cake, Ronald admitted to thirty-six, Wilberforce to forty.

"You don't look forty," decided Mollie: and at that moment, just as she was thinking she had never listened to a more artificial conversation, Aliette trapped her host's blue eyes in a glance no woman could possibly mistake.

In a way the glance, so momentary, so quickly veiled that only her heart assured her that she had actually seen it, resembled the glance she had trapped in her husband's eyes over dinner. And yet it was utterly different. It held reverence, a resigned hopelessness, a devotional quality of which Hector's cold gray pupils could never be capable.

Now, with amazement, she knew herself panicked. Panicked, not because of the look in his eyes, but because she realized that, in another second, her own would have responded to them. She was not "shocked" at his daring; her inaccessible beauty had not passed through seven years of married life in London without various similar experiences. But she was "shocked" at her own impulse. Heretofore such glances, even the words which on occasion accompanied them, had left her completely indifferent, utterly uncaring, positively contemptuous. This--did not leave her indifferent. This--this mattered....

Subconsciously, she who never swore began swearing at herself. "You're a fool, Aliette. A damn fool." Doubt nagged her. "You made a mistake. You only imagined that glance." The code nagged her. "Even if you didn't imagine it, he had no right----"

And all the time her outward self, the socially-trained Aliette, was behaving as though nothing unusual had occurred, filling teacups, nibbling cake, talking this or that triviality. No, she was not an ardent church-goer. Yes, her brother-in-law preached splendidly. But she objected to seeing him in the pulpit. Why? She didn't quite know why; it seemed too intimate, somehow or other. Like being introduced to the Deity as a relation by marriage.

Mollie and Wilberforce laughed at that. Their laughter disturbed Aliette. She and Cavendish sat stupidly silent till church-bells began.

"You'd better come with us. It will do you both good," said Mollie to the solicitor.

"I haven't been inside a church since I left the army," declared Wilberforce.

"All the more reason to come with us," smiled Mollie, who liked this big auburn man, had liked him more and more ever since he was first introduced.

And to church, casually, those four went.