She saw his lips tighten.  ‘My husband goes with me,’ she replied quickly and stopped, flushing as she realised that she had meant and conveyed an apology.

’I should have thought that the Continent would have been more advisable as a change.’

‘The Continent!  I don’t want to travel far.  I am so tired.’  She spoke in a tone of weariness which touched Fielding in spite of himself.  He looked at her more closely.  ‘Yes,’ he said gently, ’you look very tired.  You have been doing too much.’

‘No, it isn’t that,’ she replied.  ‘One thinks of things, that’s all.’  She bent her head and was silent for a little, tracing a pattern on the table-cloth with a finger absently.  Then she added in a low voice, ’I suppose few women ever think at all until after they are married.’

The voice was low, and Fielding was conscious of something new in the tone of it, a deeper vibration, a sincerity different in kind from that surface frankness which he had always known in her.  He wondered whether she had struck down from her pinchbeck sentimentality into something that rang solid in the depths of her nature.  He looked at her again, her eyes were turned to his.  With the shadows about them, they looked bigger, darker, more piteously appealing.  She was no less a child to him, the child looked out of her eyes, sounded in the commonplace sentiment she had spoken, and the air of originality with which she had spoken it.  But the child seemed beginning to learn the lesson of womanhood, and from the one mistress which could teach it her.

‘But why think then?’ he asked lightly.  ’It ruins a complexion no less than before.  Or does a complexion cease to count?  Look!’ He leaned forward.  A pink carnation was in a glass in front of him, already withering from the heat.  He touched the faded tips of the petals.  ’That is the colour which conies from thinking.’

Clarice lifted her shoulders with more of sadness than impatience in the gesture.  ‘You believe,’ she said, ’no woman at all has a right to dare to think.’

‘I notice,’ he answered with the same levity, ’that the woman who thinks generally thinks of what she ought not to.’

Later, in the drawing-room, he looked for her again, and looked unsuccessfully.  The window, however, was open, and he advanced to it.  Clarice was on the balcony alone, her elbows on the rail, a hand on either side of her cheek.  Something in her attitude made him almost pity her.

‘Mrs. Mallinson,’ he said, ’you will probably think me intrusive, but do you think your visit really wise?’ Clarice turned towards him quickly with something of defiance in her manner.  ‘You are tired,’ he went on, ’you want rest.  Well, an election isn’t a very restful time, even for the onlooker.’

Clarice did not reply for a moment, and when she did she replied with an impulsive frankness, to which his friendly tone had prompted her.  ’To tell you the truth, I am not anxious to go.  I don’t want to, but Sidney wants to.’