"I shan't stay much longer myself," observed Noel nonchalantly.
Alex was conscious of keeping the words as it were at the back of her mind, with the implication which she attached to them, while the conversation at the small table became general.
As she followed her hostess and Lady Isabel from the room, Noel, holding open the door, said to her in a rapid, anxious tone, very low:
"You'll come out into the garden afterwards, won't you?"
An enigmatic "perhaps" was not in Alex' vocabulary.
She gave him a quick, radiant smile, and nodded emphatically.
It never occurred to her eager prodigality that she ran any risk of cheapening the favours that so few had ever coveted.
In the garden she moved along the gravelled walk beside him, actually breathless from inward excitement.
"There was heaps more I wanted to say to you about the book," Noel remarked disconsolately. "I shan't have any one to exchange ideas with now. They're all so old—and besides, I don't think English people as a rule care much about psychology and that sort of thing. They're so keen on games. So am I, in a way, but I must say it seems to me that the study of human nature is a good deal more worth one's while."
"People are so interesting," said Alex. She was perfectly aware of the futility of her remark as she made it, but in some undercurrent of her consciousness there floated the conviction that one need not put forth any great powers of originality in order to obtain response from Noel Cardew.