They had ridden over from opposite directions—he from Farleigh Wallop on the downs south of Basingstoke, she from Aldermaston in the Kennet Valley: to meet on the site of the Roman Calleva Atrebatum, the modern Silchester. This was in the beginning of July, 1886. The Roman city of early Christian Britain was then—and now—only marked by two-thirds of an encircling wall of rough masonry, crowned with ivy and even trees. There were grassy hummocks concealing a forum, a basilica and a few houses. An occasional capital of a column or obvious blocks of ancient hewn stone, scattered here and there among the herbage, made it clear, apart from tradition, that the place of their rendezvous had a momentous past. But its present was of purely agricultural interest—waving fields of green wheat, sheep grazing on the enclosed mounds, an opulent farmstead—unless you were a landscape painter of the Birket Foster school: then you raved about the thatched cottages, the old church and its churchyard.
On this July morning Captain Roger Brentham and Sibyl Grayburn had the untilled portion of the site of Calleva Atrebatum quite to themselves. This, no doubt, was the reason why they had decided to meet there for an explanation which the man deemed to be due to him from the young woman. He, of course, arrived first, but Sibyl was not long in making her appearance from the direction of Silchester common. A groom who rode behind her at the sight of Captain Brentham touched his hat and trotted away.... Brentham tied up the two horses in the shade of the Roman wall.
Sibyl disposed herself gracefully on a mound which covered the site of a Roman dwelling, arranged the long skirt of her riding habit so that the riding trousers and other suggestions of her limbs might not be too obvious to the male eye.
Roger was a captain in the Indian Army, about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, strongly built, tanned in complexion, supple in figure, good-looking, keen-eyed. Sibyl Grayburn was a decidedly pretty young woman of twenty-five, the daughter of Colonel Grayburn who had recently moved from Aldershot to Aldermaston and was trying to live the life of a gentleman farmer on rather slender means. The Brenthams and Grayburns of the younger generation were distant cousins.
Roger (seating himself on the mound not too near to Sibyl, and scanning her attentively): "Well, you're just as pretty as you were five years ago—a little filled out perhaps.... And this is how we meet. How utterly different from what I had been looking forward to! I remember when we said good-bye at Farleigh how you cried, and how for the first four years you scarcely missed a mail.... And you can't say I didn't write—when I got a chance.... Or that I didn't work like a nigger to get a position to afford to marry—and now I hear from Maud you're going to marry Silchester. To tell you the truth it didn't come as a complete shock. I saw hints of it in some beastly Society paper that some one posted to me at Aden—I suppose it was you! And this is what women call fidelity!"
Sibyl (at first keeps her eyes on the turf, but presently looks Brentham defiantly in the face): "If women of my own age were to discuss my case—not mere romantic school girls—they would say I had acted with ordinary common sense, and very unselfishly. I am, as you know, twenty-five, and I'm sure you won't have enough to marry on for several years—I should never again get such a chance ... and I really do like Lord Silchester, you don't know how kind he can be—and you can't really care so very much. You reached England a fortnight ago, and never even wrote to me...."
Roger: "I was too much taken aback by that paragraph in the World ... and Maud gave me a hint in the letter she sent to my club. Besides, I had to stop in London to see the Foreign Office and the India Office ... and ... and to attend a missionary meeting" (Sibyl ejaculates with scorn: "Missionary meeting!") "and get some clothes.... I had nothing fit to wear when I landed...."
Sibyl: "Well, I'm not blaming you. I only meant that if you were so madly in love with me as you pretend you would have dashed down to get a sight of me before you went hobnobbing with your missionary friends ... or bothered about clothes. I did not want my engagement to come to you as a shock, so I did post that World to you and got Gerry to address it—and I told Maud, so that she might prepare you. But do let's be calm and sensible and not waste time in needless reproaches. I must get back to lunch. We've got Aunt Christabel coming—she helped to bring it about, you know." (Roger interpolates "Damn her!") "She's got twice mother's determination.... Dear old Roger.... I am sorry ... in a way ... but you'll find heaps of girls, much nicer than I am, ready to jump at the prospect of marrying you." (Here Sibyl's eyes glanced with a little regret at his turned-away face, with the bronzed cheek, the firm profile and the upward twist of the dark moustache.) "And you know our 'engagement' was only boy-and-girl fun. Besides, now I know more about things—I was so young when you went away—I don't approve of cousins marrying.... Isn't their—I mean aren't their ... children deaf and dumb or congenital idiots, or something unpleasant?..." (And here Sibyl, appropriately to the period in which she was living, blushed a deeper rose than the ride had given her at the audacity in alluding to children as the result of marriage.)
Roger: "Nonsense. Heaps of cousins marry and everything turns out all right if they come of healthy stock as we do. Besides, we're only second cousins. But of course this is nothing but an evasion. You thought you could do better for yourself by marrying an elderly peer, and so you threw me over...."
Sibyl: "Well! I did think I might, and not selfishly. There's papa—more or less in a financial tangle over his farm.... There's mother, wearing herself ill, trying to make both ends meet ... and Clara and Juliet to be brought out, and the boys to be educated and got into professions..." (crying a little or pretending to do so out of self-pity) "...I know I'm sacrificing myself for my family, but what would you have me do? I shall soon become an old maid, and you won't be able to marry for ever so long...."