"I am going back to London," she continued, lowering her voice a little, "with some very strange impressions and some very pleasant memories. I feel that your life here is, in its way, very beautiful, and yet the contemplation of your future fills me with an immense curiosity. I have not talked to you for very long, Mr. Strangewey, and you may not be quite the sort of person I think you are, but I am seldom mistaken. I am an artist, you see, and we have perceptions. I think that even here the time will come when the great unrest will seize you, too, in its toils. Though the color may not fade from your hills, and though the apple-blossom may still glorify your orchard, and your flowers bloom and smell as sweetly, and your winds bring you the same music, I think that the time will come when the note in you which answers to these things, and which gives you contentment, will fail to respond. Then I think—I hope, perhaps—that we may meet."
She spoke very softly, almost under her breath, and when she had finished there seemed everywhere a strange emptiness of sound. The panting of the engine from the motor-car, Stephen's measured words as he walked with his uncongenial companion, seemed to come to John from some other world.
His voice, when he spoke, sounded a little harsh. Although he was denying it fiercely to himself, he was filled with a dim, harrowing consciousness that the struggle had already begun. Notwithstanding the unrealized joy of these few hours, his last words to Louise were almost words of anger; his last look from beneath his level, close-drawn eyebrows was almost militant.
"I hope," he declared, "that what you have said may not be true. I hope fervently that the time may never come when I shall feel that I need anything more in life than I can find in the home I love, in the work which is second nature to me, in my books and my sports!"
The prince, escaping gracefully from a companion who remained adamant to all his advances, had maneuvered his way to their side. The last few steps were taken together. In a few moments they were in the car and ready to start. Stephen, with a stiff little bow, had already departed. Louise leaned out from her place with outstretched hands.
"And now good-by, dear Mr. Strangewey! Your brother would not let me make my little speech to him, so you must accept the whole of my thanks. And," she went on, the corners of her mouth twitching a little, although her face remained perfectly grave, "if the time should come when the need of reinvestments, or of some new machinery for your farm, brings you to London, will you promise that you will come and see me?"
"I will promise that with much pleasure," John answered.
She leaned back and the prince took her place, holding out his hand.
"Mr. Strangewey, although your luck has been better than mine, and you have robbed me of a visit to which I had looked forward for months, I bear you no ill-will. I trust that you will do me the honor of shooting with me before long. My head keeper arranges for the local guns, and I shall see that he sends you a list of the days on which we shall shoot. May I beg that you will select the most convenient to yourself? If you have no car here, it will give me additional pleasure to welcome you at Raynham as my guest."
John, struggling against an instinctive dislike of which, for many reasons, he was a little ashamed, murmured a few incoherent words. The prince leaned back and the car glided away, followed, a few minutes later, by Louise's own landaulet, with Aline in solitary state inside.