Rodney, instead of just mine."

"You darling!" he said. And, presently: "I'll tell you what we'll do
to-morrow, if you'll run away from your dressmaker. We'll go and buy a
car for ourselves. It's ridiculous I didn't get one long ago.
Frederica's always been at me to. You see, mother wouldn't have anything
but horses, and I sold those, of course, when she died. I've meant to
get a car, but I just never got round to it."

A small disagreeable voice, hermetically sealed in one of the remoter
caverns of him, remarked at this point that he was a liar. A motor-car,
it pointed out, was one of the things he had always denounced as a part
of the useless clutter of existence that he refused to be embarrassed
with. But it didn't speak with much conviction.

She picked up his hand and brushed her lips softly against the palm of
it. "You're so wonderful to me," she said. "You give me so much. And
I--I have so little to give back. And I want to--I want to give you all
the world." And then, suddenly, she put her bare arm around his neck,
drew his face to hers and kissed him.

It was the first time she had ever begun a caress like that.




CHAPTER IX

AFTER BREAKFAST