"Dulce!"
"Well?" She has not looked at him even once during the last five minutes.
"If you are unhappy in your present engagement—and I think you are—why not break with Gower? I spoke to you of this yesterday, and I say the same thing to-day. You are doing both him and yourself an injustice in letting it go on any longer."
"I don't know what to say to him."
"Then get some one else to say it. Fabian, or Uncle Christopher."
"Oh, no!" says Dulce, with a true sense of delicacy. "If it is to be done at all I shall do it myself."
"Then do it. Promise me if you get the opportunity you will say something to him about it."
"I promise," says Dulce, very faintly. Then she withdraws the hand from his, and without another word, not even a hint at what the gaining of her freedom may mean to either—or rather both—of them, they go slowly back to the garden, where they meet all the others sitting in a group upon a huge circular rustic seat beneath a branching evergreen; all, that is, except Fabian, who of late has become more and more solitary in his habits.
As Stephen has not put in an appearance at the Court now for fully two days, speculation is rife as to what has become of him.
"It is the oddest thing I ever knew," Julia is saying, as the cousins come up to the rustic-seat.