"Well, be sure and ring for anything you want."
"Very well. I shall probably sleep. By the way, I thought of asking Dickson Ingworth down for a few days. There are some duck about, you know, and he can bring his gun."
"Do, darling, if you would like him."
"Very well, then. I wonder if you'd write a note for me, explaining that I'm in bed, but shall be up to-morrow. Supposing you ask him to come in a couple of days."
"Yes, I will," she replied, kissing him with her almost maternal, protective air, "and I'll post it in Wordingham."
When she had left the room he began to smoke slowly.
He felt a certain irritation at all this love and regard, a discontent. Mary was always the same. With his knowledge of her, he could predict with absolute accuracy what she would do in almost every given moment.
She would do the right thing, the kind and wise thing, but the certain, the predicted thing. She lived from a great depth of being and peace personified was hers, the peace of God indeed!—but—
"She has no changes, no surprises," he thought, "all even surface, even depth."
He admired all her care and watchfulness of him with deep æsthetic pleasure. It was beautiful and he loved beauty. But now and then, it bored him as applied to himself. After six months of the unchanging gold and blue of Italy and Greece, he remembered how he had longed for a grey, weeping sky, with ashen cirrus clouds, heaped tumuli of smoke-grey and cold pearl. And sometimes after a lifeless, rotting autumn and an iron-winter, how every fibre cried out for the sun and the South!