"Oh! dear me!" Honoria cried, almost piteously. Then she added:—"But I don't see, why was that?"
"Because, I suppose, I had a sort of unwilling belief in you," he said, smiling.—Oh! this accursed conversation, why would it insistently drift back into intimacy thus!
"Have I justified that belief?" she asked, with a certain pride yet a certain eagerness.
"More than justified it," Dickie answered. "My mother, who has a touchstone for all that is of high worth, knew you from the first. Like the devils, I—I believed and trembled—at least that is how I see it all now. So your action came as a rather searching revelation and condemnation. When I perceived all that it involved—oh, well! first I went to the dogs, and then——"
The horses walked side by side. Honoria stretched out her hand impulsively, laid it on his arm.
"Richard, Richard, for pity's sake don't! You hurt me too much. It's terrible to have been the cause of such suffering."
"You weren't the cause," he said. "Lies were the cause, behind which, like a fool, I'd tried to shelter myself. You've been right, Honoria, from first to last. What does it matter after all?—Don't take it to heart. For it's over now—all over, thank God, and I have got back into normal relations with things and with people."—He looked at her very charmingly, and spoke with a fine courtesy of tone.—"One way and another you have taught me a lot, and I am grateful. And, in the future, though the conditions will be altered, I hope you'll come back here often, Honoria, and just see for yourself that my mother is content; and give my schemes and fads a kindly look in at the same time. And perhaps give me a trifle of sound advice. I shall need it safe enough. You see what I want to get at is temperance—temperance all round, towards everything and everybody—not fanaticism, which, in some respects, is a much easier attitute of mind."
Richard looked up into the whispering, green tide overhead.
"Yes, one must deny oneself the luxury of fanaticism, if possible," he said, "deny oneself the vanity of eccentricity. One must take everything simply, just in the day's work. One must keep in touch. Keep in touch with your world, the great world, the world which cultivates pleasure and incidentally makes history, as well as with the world of the dust-cart—I know that well enough—if one's to be quite sane. You see loneliness, a loneliness of which I am thankful to think you can form no conception, is the curse of persons like myself. It inclines one to hide, to sulk, to shut oneself away and become misanthropic. To hug one's misery becomes one's chiefest pleasure—to nurse one's grief, one's sense of injury. Oh! I'm wary, very wary now, I tell you," he added, half laughing. "I know all the insidious temptations, the tricks and frauds, and pitfalls of this affair. And so I'll continue to go to Grimshott garden parties as discipline now and then, while I gather my disabled and decrepit family very closely about me and say words of wisdom to it—wisdom derived from a mature and extensive personal experience."
There was a pause before Miss St. Quentin spoke. Then she said slowly.