During the progress of the luncheon, Christian found no opportunity for intimate conversation with Emanuel’s wife. The elderly and ponderously verbose Lord Chobham sat upon her right; there was the thin-faced, exigeant wife of some clerical person in gaiters—a rural dean, was it not?—full of dogmatic commonplaces, on his left. The other people did not seem to talk so much. The scene down the table—with so much black cloth offset garishly against the white linen in the daylight—presented an effect of funereal sobriety, curiously combined with a spontaneous reaction of the natural man against this effect. The guests ate steadily, and with energy; Christian noted with interest how freely they also drank. For himself, he could not achieve an appetite, but thirst was in the air. He lifted his glass bravely to Lord Julius, whose massive bulk and beard confronted him at the other end of the table—and then to others whose glance from time to time caught his.

Once he found the chance to murmur to Kathleen: “When this is over, I hope you will manage it so that I may speak with you.”

She nodded slow assent, without looking at him. He, observing her profile, realized all at once that something was amiss with her. It came back to him now that a certain intensity of sadness had dwelt in the first glance they had exchanged that morning, upon meeting. At the time he had referred it to the general aspect of woe which people put on at funerals. He saw now that it was a grief personal to herself. And now that he thought of it, too, there had been much the same stricken look upon Emanuel’s face. It was incredible that they should be thus devoured by grief at the fact of his grandfather’s death. No one had liked that old man overmuch—but surely they least of all. The emotion of Lord Julius was more intelligible—and yet even this had a quality of broken dejection in it which seemed independent of Caermere’s cause for mourning.

The disquieting conviction that these dearly beloved cousins of his—these ineffably tender and generous friends of his—were writhing under some trouble unknown to him, took more definite shape in his mind with each new glance that he stole at her.

Once the thought sprang up that they might be unhappy because such a huge sum of money had been given to him, but on the instant he hated himself for being capable of formulating such a monstrous idea. The wondering solicitude which all this raised within him possessed his thoughts for the rest of the meal. He was consumed with impatience to get away so that he might question Kathleen about it.

Yet when at last he found himself beside her, standing before an old portrait in one of the chain of big rooms through which the liberated company had dispersed itself, this was just the question for which it seemed that no occasion would offer.

She began speaking to him at once. “The young lady—Miss Bailey, I should say—has gone for a walk—so Falkner learns from some of the women. They have the impression that she is coming back—but I don’t know that I feel quite so sure about it.” Christian’s face visibly lengthened. “It’s very awkward,” he said, with vague annoyance. “They do not arrange things in a very talented fashion, these people of mine.”

“But what could they arrange?” she argued. An indefinable listlessness in her tone struck him. “It is a free country, you know, and this is the nineteenth century. They cannot bodily capture a young woman and keep her in the Castle against her will. As I told you, I had difficulty in persuading her to come at all.”

“Ah, what did you say to her?” he asked, eagerly.

“I can hardly tell you. She is not an ordinary person—and I know only that I tried not to say ordinary things to her. But what it was that I did say——” She broke off with an uncertain gesture, and a sigh.

“Ah, you saw that she was not ordinary!” said Christian, admiringly. “I should love dearly to hear what you really think of her—the impression that she makes upon you.” Kathleen roused herself and turned to him. “Do you truly mean it, Christian?” she asked him, gravely.

“Do you blame me?” he rejoined, with uneasy indirection.

She pressed her lips together, and stared up at the picture with a troubled face. “I know so little of her,” she protested. “You put too big a responsibility upon me. It is more than I am equal to.”

With a sudden gust of self-reproach, he perceived afresh the marks of suffering in her countenance, and recalled his anxiety. “Take my arm,” he said, softly, “and let us go on into the next room. There is a terrace there, I think. Forgive me for troubling you,” he added, as they moved forward. “I ought to have seen that you are not well—that you have something on your mind.”

She did not answer him immediately. “It is Emanuel who is not well.” she said, after a pause.

Christian uttered a formless little exclamation of grieved astonishment. “Oh, it is nothing serious?” he whispered imploringly.

She shook her head in a doubtful way. “No, I think not—that is, not irrevocably. But he has worked too hard. He has broken down under the strain. We are going away for a long journey—to rest, and forget about the System.”

He bent his head to look into her eyes—trusting his glance to say the things which his lips shrank from uttering. A window stood open, and they passed out upon a broad stone terrace, shaded and pleasant under a fresh breeze full of forest odors.

“Oh—the System”—he ventured to say, as they stood alone here, and she lifted her head to breathe in the revivifying air—“I felt always that it was too much for one man. The load was too great. It would crush the most powerful man on earth.”

She nodded reflective assent. “Oh, yes—I’m afraid I hated it,” she confessed to him, in a murmur full of contrition.

“But he is going away now,” urged Christian, hopefully. “You will have him to yourself—free from care, seeing strange and beautiful new places—as long as you like. Ah, then soon enough that gaiety of yours will return to you. Why, it is such a shock to me to think of you as sad, depressed—you who are by nature so full of joy and high spirits. Ah, but be sure they will all return to you! I make no doubt whatever of that. And Emanuel, too—he will get rested and strong, and be happy as he never was before—the dear fellow!”

She smiled at him in wan, affectionate fashion. “All the courage has gone out of me,” she said. “Will it be coming back again? God knows!”

“But surely——” Christian began, with hearty confidence.

She interrupted him. “What I am fearful of—it is not so much his health, strictly speaking—but the terrible unsettling blow that all this means to him. It is like the death of a beautiful only child to the fondest of fathers. It tears his heart to pieces. He loved his work so devotedly—it was so wholly a part of his life—and to have to give it up! He says he is reconciled. Poor man, he tried with all his strength to make himself believe that he is. I catch him forcing a smile on his face when he sees me looking at him—and that is the hardest of all for me to bear. But I don’t know”—she drew a long breath, and gazed with a wistful brightening in her eyes at the placid hills and sky—“it may work itself out for the best. As you say—when we get away alone together, ah, that is where love like ours will surely tell. I do wrong to harbor any doubts at all. When two people love each other as we do—ah, Christian, boy, there’s nothing else in all the world to equal that!”

He inclined his head gravely, to mark his reverential sympathy with her mood.

“Ah, but you know nothing of it at all,” she went on. “You’re just a lad—and love is no more to be understood by instinct than any other great wisdom. Millions of people pass through life talking about love—and they would stare with surprise if you told them they never had had so much as a glimmer of the meaning of it. They use the name of love in all the matings of young couples—and there’s hardly once in a thousand times that it isn’t blasphemy to mention it. Do you know what most marriages are? Life-sentences! If you have means and intelligence, you make your prison tolerable; you can get used to it, and even grow dependent upon it—but it is a prison still. The best-behaved convict eyes his warder with a cruel thought somewhere at the back of his mind. Do you remember—when you left us the first time, I begged you to be in no haste to marry?”

He bowed again. “Oh, yes, I remember it all,” he said, soberly.

“I have come to feel so strongly upon that subject,” she explained. “It seems to me more important than all others combined. It is the last thing in the world that should be decided upon an impulse, or a passing fancy—yet that is just what happens all about us. The books are greatly to blame for that. They talk as if only boys and girls knew what love meant. They flatter the young people, and turn their empty heads, with the notion that their idlest inclinations are very probably sacred emotions—which they may trust to burn brightly in a pure flame all their lives. The innocent simpletons rush to light this penny dip that is warranted to blaze eternally, and in a week or a month they are in utter darkness. We trembled lest you, coming so suddenly into a new life, should meet with that misfortune.”

He smiled faintly at her. “You see, I have not,” he commented.

She regarded him thoughtfully. “It is impossible to make rules for others in these matters,” she observed, “but there is this thing to be said. True love must be built upon absolutely true friendship; there can be no other foundation for it You will often see two men who are fond of each other. They delight in being together. Very often you cannot imagine what is the tie between them—and they would not be able to tell you. They just like to be together—even though they may not speak for hours, and may be as different in temperament as chalk and cheese. That is the essence of friendship—and you cannot have love without it. The man and the woman must have the all-powerful sense of ideal companionship between them. They must be able to say with truth to themselves that the world will always be richer to them together than apart. There may be many other elements in love, but there can be no love at all without this element. But you wonder why I am saying all this to you.”

He made a deprecatory gesture of the hands. “I am always charmed when you talk to me. I have been remembering that dear home of yours, and how inexpressibly good you were to me. I prize that memory so fondly!”

She smiled with an approach to her old gaiety of manner. “You were like a son of our own to us. And so we think of you now—as if you were ours.”

“And with what munificence you have treated me!” he exclaimed, fervently.

“And why not? For whom else would we be laying up our money? Oh, there was no difference of opinion about that. Months ago it was decided that when you came into Caermere you should come into everything.”

“I feared that Emanuel would be angry—disappointed—at my not taking up his work—but truly I could not. It wouldn’t be easy to explain to you—but——”

“No—let us not go into reasons. He had no feeling about it whatever. How should he? It would have been as reasonable to be vexed because the lenses of his spectacles did not fit your eyes. And Emanuel is reasonableness itself. No—the experiment was quite personal to himself. Without him, it could not have gone on at all. It will not go on now, when he leaves it to others. We make some little pretense that it will—but we know in our hearts that it won’t. And there was a fatal fault in it. To begin with, that would have killed it sooner or later, in any case.”

“I know what you mean,” he interposed, with sensitive intuition. “There was no proper place in it for women. ‘The very corner-stone of the System was the perpetual enslavement of women’—or rather, I should say”—he stumbled awkwardly as the sweeping form of the quotation revealed itself to him—“I should say, it did not provide women with the opportunities which—which——”

Kathleen also had her intuitions. “May I ask?—it sounds as if you were repeating a remark—was it Miss Bailey who said that about the corner-stone?”

Christian bit his lip and flushed confusedly. “Yes—I think those were her words,” he confessed. “But you must remember,” he added, eager to minimize-the offense—“it was in the course of a long discussion on the whole subject, and she——”

“The dear girl!” said Kathleen, with a sigh of relief.

“Ah, but you would love her!” he cried, excitedly perceiving the significance of her words. “She has the noblest mind—calm and broad and serene—and so fine a nature—I know you would love her!”

Kathleen put a hand on his arm, with motherly directness. “But do you love her?” she asked.

To his own considerable surprise he hesitated. “I have that feeling of deep friendship that you described,” he said, slowly. “The charm of being where she is is like nothing else to me. I cannot think that it would ever lose its force for me. I get the effect of drawing strength and breadth of thought and temper from her, when I am with her. I would rather spend my life with her for my companion than any other woman I have ever seen. That is what you mean, is it not?”

“Partly,” she made enigmatic response. “But—now you mustn’t answer me if I ask what I’ve no business to ask—but the suspicion came to me while you were speaking—I am right, am I not, in thinking that you have said all this to her?”

“Yes,” he admitted with palpable reluctance, “and she would not listen to me. Only a few hours before I heard the news of my grandfather’s death, I asked her to be my wife, and she refused. She seemed very resolute. And yet she has some of that same feeling of friendship for me. She said that she had always a deep interest in me. She had read books—very serious books—in order to be able to advise me, if the chance ever came. All that bespeaks friendship, surely! And her coming here, to look on and still not be seen—you said yourself that she was distressed at being discovered—is not that the act of warm friendship?”

Kathleen pondered her reply. She looked away at the nearest hills across the river for some moments, with her gaze riveted fixedly as if in an absorption of interest. Without moving her head, she spoke at last: “You have a good deal to say about friendship. It is my fault—I introduced the word and insisted on it—but did you also lay such stress upon this ‘friendship’ to her?”

“You do not know her nature,” he assured her. “There is nothing weak or commonplace in it. One does not talk to her as to an ordinary woman—as you yourself said. I begged her to join her life to mine, and I put the plea on the highest possible grounds. All that I have repeated to you, and much more, I said to her—how great was my need of her, how lofty her character seemed to me, how all my life I should revere her, and gain strength and inspiration from being with her.”

“H—m,” said Kathleen.

“Do you mean—?” he began, regarding his companion wonderingly—“was that not enough? Remember the kind of woman she is—proud of her independence, occupied with large thoughts, not to be appealed to by any but the highest motives—a creature who disdains the sentimental romances of inferior women—do you mean that there should have been something more? I do love her—and should I have told her so in so many words?”

“I’m afraid that’s our foible,” she made answer. On the face that she turned to him, something like the old merry light was shining. “You goose!” she scolded at him, genially.

His eyes sparkled up as with a light from her own. “Oh, I will make some excuse, and get away from these people, and find her,” he cried. “She will be returning, if not here, then to the inn, down below the church, don’t you think? There would be nothing out of the way in my riding down, would there? Or if I sent a man down with a letter, appealing to her not to go away—telling her why? There is no earthly reason why she should not stop here at the Castle. Her sister is here—why, of course, she belongs quite to the family party. How dull of me not to have thought of that! Of course, Cora can go and fetch her.”

“I think I would leave Cora out of it,” Kathleen advised him. “There is nothing that you cannot do better yourself. Come here! Do you see that patch of reddish stain on the hill there, above the poplars where the iron has colored the rock? Well, look to the right, on the ledge just a bit higher up—there is Miss Bailey. I have been watching her for some minutes. She has been round the hill; the path she is on will lead her to the Mere Copse—and to the heath beyond the orchards.”

His eyes had found the moving figure, microscopic yet unmistakable in the sunshine against the verdant face of the hill—and they dwelt upon it for a meditative moment.

Then he turned to Kathleen, and took her hand, and almost wrung it in his own. “Do let us go in!” he urged her, with exultant eagerness.