“Back to my own country,” he answered. “Perhaps in two weeks, perhaps three—who can tell?”
“But you are coming to Devenham first?” she asked eagerly.
“I am coming to Devenham first,” he assented. “I called this afternoon to let your father know the date on which I could come. I promised that he should hear from me today. He was good enough to say either Thursday or Friday. Thursday, I find, will suit me admirably.”
She drew a little sigh.
“So you are going back,” she said softly. “I wonder why so many people seem to have taken it for granted that you would settle down here. Even I had begun to hope so.”
He smiled.
“Lady Grace,” he said, “I am not what you call a cosmopolitan. To live over here in any of these Western countries would seem to denote that one may change one’s dwelling place as easily as one changes one’s clothes. The further east you go, the more reluctant one is, I think, to leave the shadow of one’s own trees. The man who leaves my country leaves it to go into exile. The man who returns, returns home.”
She was a little perplexed.
“I should have imagined,” she said, “that the people who leave your country as emigrants to settle in American or even over here might have felt like that. But you of the educated classes I should have thought would have found more over here to attract you, more to induce you to choose a new home.”
He shook his head.