two, and an expressed determination to sit out on the hillside till lunch-time.
"It is boxing-day, I know," she said, "but it is too warm to box, even if I knew how. The English climate has gone quite mad, and I have told my maid to put my fur coat in a box with those little white balls until May. Now I suppose you are all going to play the foolish game with those other little white balls till lunch."
Seymour was seated in the window-sill, stitching busily at a piece of embroidery which Antoinette had started for him.
"I am going to do nothing of the sort," he said. "It is much too fine a day to do anything so limited as to play golf. Besides there is no one here fit to play with. Nadine, will you be very kind and ring for my maid? I am getting in a muddle."
Berts, who was sitting near him, got up, looking rather ill. Also he resented being told he was not fit to play with.
"May I have my perambulator, please, Nadine?" he asked.
Seymour grinned.
"Berts, you are easier to get a rise out of than any one I ever saw," he remarked. "It is hardly worth while fishing for you, for you are always on the feed. And if you attempt to rag, I shall prick you with my needle."
Nadine lingered a little after the others had gone, and as soon as they were alone Seymour put down his embroidery.
"May I come and sit on the hillside with you?" he asked. "Or is the—the box-seat already engaged?"
"Hugh suggested it," she said. "I was going out with him."
Seymour picked up his work again.
"It seems to me I am behaving rather nicely," he said. "At the same time I'm not sure that I am not behaving rather anemically. I haven't seen you much since I came down here. And after all I didn't come down here to see Esther."
Nadine frowned, and laid her hand on his arm. But she did not do it quite instinctively. It was clear she thought it would be appropriate. Certainly that was quite clear to Seymour.
"Take that hand away," he said. "You only put it there because it was suitable. You didn't want to touch me."
Nadine removed her hand, as if his coat-sleeve was red-hot.
"You are rather a brute," she said.
"No, I am not, unless it is brutal to tell you what you know already. I repeat that I am behaving rather nicely."
It was owing to him to do him justice.
"I know you are," she said, "you are behaving very nicely indeed. But it is only for a short time, Seymour. I don't mean that you won't always behave nicely, but that there are only a limited number of days on which this particular mode of niceness will be required of you, or be even possible. Hugh is going away next week; after that you and I will be Darby and Joan before he sees me again. You are all behaving nicely: he is too. He just wanted one week more of the old days, when we didn't think, but only babbled and chattered. I can't say that he is reviving them with very conspicuous success: he doesn't babble much, and I am sure he thinks furiously all the time. But he wanted the opportunity: it wasn't much to give him."
"Especially since I pay," said Seymour quickly.
He saw the blood leap to Nadine's face.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I oughtn't to have said that, though it is quite true. But I pay gladly: you must believe that also. And I'm glad Hugh is behaving nicely, that he doesn't indulge in—in embarrassing reflections. Also, when does he go away?"
"Tuesday, I think."
"Morning?" asked Seymour hopefully.
Nadine laughed: he had done that cleverly, making a parody and a farce out of that which a moment before had been quite serious.
"You deserve it should be," she said.
"Then it is sure to be in the afternoon. Now I've finished being spit-fire—I want to ask you something. You haven't been up to your usual form of futile and clannish conversation. You have been rather plaintive and windy—"
"Windy?" asked Nadine.
"Yes, full of sighs, and I should say it was Shakespeare. Are you worrying about anything?"
She looked up at him with complete candor.
"Why, of course, about Hughie," she said. "How should I not?"
"I don't care two straws about that," said Seymour, "as long as your worrying is not connected with me. I mean I am sorry you worry, but I don't care. Of course you worry about Hugh. I understand that, because I understand what Hugh feels, and one doesn't like one's friends feeling like that. But it's not about—about you and me?"
Nadine shook her head and Seymour got up.
"Well, let us all be less plaintive," he said. "I have been rather plaintive too. I think I shall go and take on that great foolish Berts at golf. He will be plaintive afterwards, but nobody minds what Berts is."
Whatever plaintiveness there was about, was certainly not shared by the weather, which, if it was mad, as Nadine had suggested, was possessed by a very genial kind of mania. An octave of spring-like days, with serene suns, and calm seas, and light breezes from the southwest had decreed an oasis in midwinter, warm halcyon days made even in December the snowdrops and aconites to blossom humbly and bravely, and set the birds to busy themselves with sticks and straws as if nesting-time was already here. New grass already sprouted green among the grayness of the older growths, and it seemed almost cynical to doubt that spring was not verily here. Indeed where Hugh and Nadine sat this morning, it was May not March that seemed to have invaded and conquered December; there lay upon the hillside a vernal fragrance that set a stray bee or two buzzing round the honied sweetness of the gorse with which the time of blossoming is never quite over, and to-day all the winds were still, and no breeze stirred in the bare slender birches, or set the spring-like stalks of the heather quivering. Only, very high up in the unplumbed blue of the zenith thin fleecy clouds lay stretched in streamers and combed feathers of white, showing that far above them rivers of air swept headlong and swift.
Nadine had a favorite nook on this steep hillside below the house, reached by a path that stretched out to the south of the bay. It was a little hollow, russet-colored now with the bracken, of the autumn, and carpeted elsewhere by the short-napped velvet of the turf. Just in front, the cliff plunged sheer down to the beach, where they had so often bathed in the summer, and where the reef of tumbled sandstone rocks stretched out into the waveless sea, like brown amphibious monsters that were fish at high tide and grazing beasts at the ebb. Down there below, a school of gulls hovered and fished with wheelings of white wings, but not a ripple lapped the edges of the rocks. Only the sea breathed softly as in sleep, stirring the fringes of brown weed that had gathered there, but no thinnest line of white showed breaking water. Along the sandy foreshore of the bay there was the same stillness: heaven and earth and ocean lay as if under an enchantment. The sand dunes opposite, and the hills beyond, lay reflected in the sea, as if in the tranquillity of some land-locked lake. There was a spell, a hush over the world, to be broken by God-knew-what gentle awakening of activity, or catastrophic disturbance.
The two had walked to this withdrawn hollow of the hill almost in silence. He had offered to carry her books for her, but she had said that they were of no weight, and after pause he had announced a fragment of current news to which she
