The various preparations for the dinner that night turned out, however, to be more or less in vain, for the travellers were delayed and did not reach the house until nearly ten o'clock. Dinner had been arranged for eight, and when half past eight had struck Grisel rang and sent word to cook that they would not wait any longer.

"The cook," she explained to Sir John, "is a sensitive soul and very particular about having her things ruined by waiting."

Sir John laughed. "Well, I am glad, for my part I'm hungry. The sea air has given me a furious appetite."

Little Jenny Wick looked at him thoughtfully. She did not think him looking well and her bright eyes revealed the thought.

He smiled down at her. "I know what you are thinking, Miss Jenny," he said, as if speaking to a child. "The heat has fagged me a little, but I'm really very well. How is your mother?" he added, for he and old Mrs. Wick had struck up a great friendship and more than once he had taken her for long rides in his car by himself.

Although she was the mother of so young a girl as Jenny, Mrs. Wick was several years older than her new friend, and treated him rather in an elder-sisterly way that had a great charm for him whose people had been dead for years, and who at "Happy House" was so very much the elder of everyone.

So now he was glad to hear that Mrs. Wick was well, and looking forward to seeing him before long.

"We must have a long spin some day before I go away," he answered. "I always enjoy a talk with your mother."

Jenny nodded. "So does she with you, Sir John."

"She's so glad Olly is coming back she doesn't know what to do with herself," the girl added, giving a little shake in a bird-like way to her pretty frilly frock, as she rose to go in to dinner. "The way she prefers that boy to me is simply scandalous."

Barclay laughed. "You look ill-treated. I suppose," he added as they crossed the hall en masse, "Miss Perkins will be very glad, too, if she is back yet, that is from Weston-super-Mare!"

"Yes, she and her mother and father are at Bury St. Edmunds now, with some relations of Mr. Perkins. Mother went down the other day and spent a couple of nights, but they could not put me up."

The dinner was rather silent, for everyone was disappointed by the non-arrival of the travellers. Paul, who was in good form and the happy temper that Jenny Wick's presence always produced in him, did most of the talking, for he was intensely interested in a lot of new songs, Russian and Spanish, that he had just got and, with the naÏvete that was in his case, as it so often is, only a form of selfishness, he assumed that everyone else was as deeply interested as he was.

Grisel, who had not seen her lover that day until he arrived rather late for dinner, told him in a low voice of her talk with her father on the telephone.

"He really was upset about something," she added at the end of the story. "Of course, he was not so upset as he seemed, but there is something wrong, I'm sure. I believe mother would take him back if Clara Crichell did not marry him after all."

"What on earth makes you think that she won't marry him?" he asked, puzzled. "No woman alive would go through all this business of the divorce and the publicity unless she really cared for the man."

Grisel shrugged her thin shoulders. "Oh, well, I don't know. You see, we know him so well that I suppose we instinctively fear she may have got to know him and—and—not liked what she has learnt."

It struck Barclay as a very sad thing for a man that his own daughter should judge him in this unrancorous but pitiless way.

"I rather like your father, you know," he said slowly, "in some ways. He is very much nicer away from home than he is in it."

"He must be," she answered, with the charity of utter indifference. "He must be charming somewhere, and he certainly isn't when he is here!"

"It struck me the last time I saw him," Barclay went on slowly, "that he was not—very happy. I suppose he misses your mother."

Grisel stirred, and he hastened to explain.

"Oh, yes, I mean just that—misses your mother. She has taken care of him for years, you know, and I don't imagine Mrs. Crichell would be as patient with his moods and vagaries as your mother has always been."

Then suddenly the memory of her father in his less pleasant phases swept over Grisel, and her face was grim and tight as she answered:

"No, and I hope she isn't! His hot milk last thing at night, and his four grades of underclothing, and his trouser-pressing machines, and his indigestion! His hot bottles in the middle of the night every time he's dined too well, and poor mother poking around in the kitchen heating kettles on the gas-ring! Oh, no, Mrs. Crichell won't much like that side of her beau sabreur, as she calls him."

After dinner, as they walked in the garden, Sir John told her that he had met Walter Crichell that morning.

"The poor wretch looks miserably unhappy," he said. "Those white hands of his look—look shrunken in their skin—rather as if he had kid gloves on."

Grisel shuddered. "Ugh! his hands are loathsome! After all," she added a moment later, staring at a rose-bush, "there is no reason why the poor wretch should be hurt like this just because he has horrid hands! Oh! John," she cried, catching his arm almost as if she were frightened, "what an awful lot of misery there is in the world."

He covered her small hand with his big, strong, brown one.

"Yes, dear, there is. A great deal of it is inevitable and has to be borne, but the other kind—the kind that can be avoided—ought always, I think, to be avoided. It is right that it should be avoided."

She loosed his arm and looked up at him as they walked on.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that when people find they have made mistakes—and everyone does find that once in a while—I think that no consideration of pride or advantage ought to stand in the way of open confession and restoration."

There was a little pause.

"You are thinking about mother and father. You mean that if Mrs. Crichell finds she has been mistaken, she ought to say so and go back to her husband, even though people laughed at her for it."

"No, I was not thinking of the Crichells or your father."

The great heat had gathered masses of thick, quilted-looking clouds over London, and nervous little spurts of wind startled the trees every now and then and stirred the heavy-headed roses. The air smelt of dust and drying vegetation.

Grisel looked up. "There's going to be a storm," she said. "Shall we go in?"

"If you like, dear; but the storm won't break yet awhile. Though," he stood looking up at the sky for a moment, his thick white hair moving, she thought, just as the leaves on the trees moved in the spasmodic wind, "there is going to be one."

They went slowly into the drawing-room, although the others were upstairs, and Paul's beautiful voice was already heard trying one of the new songs.

"Let's stay here," he suggested. "It's cooler on this side of the house, and I don't feel inclined for music to-night."

"Neither do I," she said, "but Paul does, so we shall have it! Yes, it is cool in here. Give me a cigarette, John, will you?"

He did so, and they sat in almost unbroken silence, smoking. Presently the door-bell rang, and voices were heard outside.

"That's Moreton and Maud," Griselda explained, without rising. "They have motored up from Burnham Beeches to see Guy."

"You ought to go up to them, oughtn't you?" he asked gently.

"No; they will be all right, and they'll love hearing the songs, and Paul will tell them we are in the garden." Again they were silent.

The air was extremely oppressive in spite of the rising wind, and Grisel's head ached faintly. Every now and then one of the long lace curtains would blow into the room and writhe about as if reaching for something, to sink back listlessly into its place.

"How heavy the scent of those lilacs is," the girl said after a while, glancing at a big bowl of them on the table, and Barclay raised his head suddenly, with a new look in his face.

"Yes; that brings back to me a story that I've been thinking of telling you. I think I will tell you now, Grisel," he said. "Something that happened in my youth. My father was a parson, and there were six of us children. My mother died when I was about eight, and an old aunt of ours, my father's sister, came and lived with us and brought us up. She was a good woman, absolutely without imagination, and she looked rather like Miss Breeze. When I think of my Aunt Susan I always see her behind a kind of barricade of baskets full of mending of all kinds. She spent the greater part of her life with a boy's stocking drawn up over her left arm and a needle full of wool in her right hand. She did her best by us, poor woman, but she bored us, every one, and I suppose she could not have been very wise about our health, because before I left home four of us had died, two—the twins, who had never been very strong—of pneumonia, and the other two of diphtheria. It is not very interesting, but it explains just a little the way I felt that day——" He broke off.

"I was just twenty-one," he went on, smiling at her, "an awkward colt of a boy, too big for my clothes, and too hungry for my father's income, and one day my sister Celia, the only other one of us who lived to grow up——"

"I know—the one who died in New Zealand."

"Yes. Well, one day Celia and I went up to Coops Hall, our nearest neighbours, some people named Fenwick, to plan tennis. It was a day like yesterday, very sunny and hot, and it must have been about this time of the year, because the white lilacs—a great clump of them of which Mrs. Fenwick was very proud—were in full bloom, and the air thick with their scent."

He glanced at the bowl on the table as he spoke.

"I remember perfectly well how I felt as we came up the incline of the lawn to the tulip trees where two or three hammocks were slung and where the Fenwick girls and their brother were sitting. That is one of the moments in my life of which I can still always recapture the very feel." After a moment he went on. "She was standing, leaning on a croquet mallet, with her sideface towards me. Her left profile, which was always better than the right—and still is for that matter——" He smiled, his face singularly sweetening at the thought.

"But, John!" the girl cried in amazement, "you romantic old thing, you are telling me a love story!"

He looked at her gravely. "I am, my dear. The only love story I ever had until I met you."

She shrank back in her big chair as if drawing away from a too close physical touch, and he went on.

"She wore a blue and white striped dress, as it used to be called in those days, bunched up at the back over a bustle, and, oh dear me, how her hair shone in the sun! It was rather a saintly face," he went on after a moment, "but the hair was the hair of a siren, full of waves and tendrils, and bewitching high lights and shades. Well, I was introduced to her, and we played croquet together, and then we had tea. And that was all. Did you ever read a little poem, 'There is a lady sweet and kind'?"

She shook her head. "No, John. You know I don't like poetry much."

"Well, listen. I don't remember the exact words, but it's like this:

"'There is a lady sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind;
I did but seeing her pass by,
And yet I loved her until I die.
"'Cupid has wounded and doth range
Her country and she my love doth change;
But change the earth and change the sky,
But still will I love her till I die.'

"Well, my dear, I was exactly like that romantic youth. For over a quarter of a century my mind remained perfectly true to the memory of that sad-faced girl in the garden. She came once to my father's rectory, and we played tennis, and after that I didn't see her again for over thirty years."

Grisel watched him with wide, fascinated eyes, as if he was someone she had never seen before. She was trying to do what is so hard for a young person to do—look back into an old person's youth and really see that youth face to face.

"Why was she unhappy?" she asked as he paused and very slowly lit another cigarette.

"Oh, that, too, was a romance. Hers, just as she was mine. She had been sent to the Fenwicks to try to distract her mind and draw her away from a young man to whom she was attached."

"Did you ever tell her that you had fallen in love with her?"

"Good heavens, no! I was not a lover. I was a worshipper, and she was so beautiful, so perfect——" He broke off. "Ah, my dear, that's the kind of love that's worth having."

She watched him, her face changing to one of less detached curiosity.

"Dear me, John," she said, "you alarm me, for this kind of love is certainly not what you give me."

She laughed, but he looked at her very seriously.

"No," he said, "it is not. I give you the best I have got, but it is not much for a young creature like you."

She flushed, and her face contracted for a second.

"Oh, I hope you don't think I am ungrateful," she stammered.

He shook his head. "No, it is only that I'm wondering if it was not wrong of me to persuade you to accept—so little."

"But, John, I——"

"Wait a moment, Grisel. I have been thinking about this for a long time now, and this seems the right moment to say it. Hallo! it's raining!" he broke off, looking out of the window.

"It has been raining for a long time," she said dully. "Go on, please."

The air, quickened by the quiet rush of water, came in refreshingly at the window, and the music upstairs had ceased, so that the silence was very perfect.

"I think," Barclay went on, looking at her with a reassuring smile, "that it is my duty to advise you to think it all over again—everything."

"Oh, John," she faltered, "this is my fault. It is because I have been dull and moody. You think I'm ungrateful. You must think I am, but, indeed, I am not."

"Any marriage that is based on gratitude," he said sharply, leaning forward in the gloom, "is bound to go smash. I mean exactly what I say, Grisel: you must think it all over again. I have told you the truth; you know just how I feel, and, of course, you have known all along that you do not love me as"—he rose and came slowly towards her—"as, say, Miss Perkins presumably loves Wick."

She stood facing him with quickened breath. "Miss Perkins has nothing to do with it, John," she said with a quiet dignity that touched him. "If you wish to break our engagement, I—I am quite willing to let you do so, of course, but I don't wish to break it." She turned and went out of the room.

He went to the window and stood looking out into the delightful rain; he could smell fresh leaves and revived flowers; the very smell of wet dust was pleasant.

For a long time he stood there, going over in his mind the scene that had just passed. It struck him as very odd that Grisel had not guessed that the girl in his story had been her mother. He could not, in his well-balanced middle age, realise the savage strength of her youthful egotism. It seemed strange to him, but it was very plain, that the only interest in his story lay, to her, in the fact that it explained why he had not much left to give her—her. The story itself seemed to her, he could see, as remote as if its actors had been contemporaries of Noah. It was too far off for her to feel it. Quite different, however, it had been when he mentioned Miss Perkins' name. Half anxiously he had hoped by mentioning Miss Perkins to precipitate the crisis that he felt to be on its way, but nothing happened. His gun had missed fire.

"I shall have to have a talk with Mrs. Walbridge," he said to himself at last as the clock struck half-past nine. "Something has got to be done, poor little thing——" Then he went upstairs and joined the others.