"I always told you I wanted our engagement kept secret; it would have been much better. It was an experiment, rather a disastrous one for Jack—"
"And for you?"
"—and it should never have been made public. Engagements never ought to be made public, and if they were what they claim to be they never would be. It is because they are such miserable, heartless arrangements that we have to take refuge in the approbation of society to make them a success at all; if it were not for the connivance of their friends I don't believe people would ever get to the marriage service at all. No wonder men say such hard things about women; we simply destroy all the sentiment that is in them by our eagerness to cash it at once, and then we go in for a cheap cynicism and call them heartless brutes. If I were a man I would never ask a woman to be my wife, never, never, never! At least, not if I were in love with her."
She spoke rapidly and vehemently, and the musician framed her face in his hands and coughed a little to steady his voice.
"Poor Jack!" he said almost inaudibly.
"Why do you say that?" she asked, in the same tone.
"Because he might have married you, and he has just missed it," he breathed in reply; and their heads drew closer together and remained so for a few seconds. They had had enough in their two lives to make them either sure friends or enemies. And morality is mainly a question of circumstance, and largely dependent on the chances of detection.
"Why are you so good to me?" she asked.
"Am I?" he said with a smile, and he removed one of his hands to brush off the ash of his cigarette. "I am only what you make me. I have always been in your hands, you know."
"Rubbish!" she said, and laughed unnaturally, and freed herself from his touch and walked away to the window. Norah's voice came from the orchard, calling him, and he went out through the door. Lady Joan sat on the window ledge and thought over what he had been saying, and then about the words of her letter to Jack, and then that it was time to walk back to the Court and speak about the mending of a certain fence to the man. And finally she thought about nothing at all as she yielded to the drowsiness of the hot spring morning, and rested her cheek against a background of green creepers and became conscious of nothing but a confused medley of well-known sounds,—the loud ticking of the clock in the way trifles assert their importance after an event, the tuneless humming of the child on the floor, the warning bell of the postman's bicycle as he came round the corner of the street, and the splash of the ducks he frightened into the pond as he came. Then she raised her heavy eyelids, and saw the musician looking at her with a strange, frightened expression on his face.