from command to command.  He saw himself first alone, and then with a wife—­a wife who was not Olivia Guion.  Then suddenly the vision changed into something misty and undefined; the road became dark, the triumphal car jolted and fell to pieces; there was reproach in the air and discomfort in his sensations.  He recognized the familiar warnings that he was not doing precisely the right thing.  He saw Olivia Guion sitting as he had left her four or five minutes before, her head bent over her stitching.  He saw her there, deserted, alone.  He saw the eyes of England on him, as he drove away in his triumphal car, leaving her to her fate.  His compunction was intense, his pity overwhelming.  Merely at turning his back on her to stroll around the lawn he felt guilty of a cowardly abandonment.  And he felt something else—­he felt the clinging of her arms around his neck; he felt the throb of her bosom against his own as she let herself break down just for a second—­just for a sob.  It seemed to him that he should feel that throb forever.

He hurried back to where he had left her.  “It’s no use,” he said to himself; “I’m in for it, by Jove.  I simply can’t leave her in the lurch.”

There was no formal correctness about Ashley’s habitual speech.  He kept, as a rule, to the idiom of the mess, giving it distinction by his crisp, agreeable enunciation.

Olivia had let the bit of embroidery rest idly in her lap.  She looked up at his approach.  He stood before her.

“Do I understand,” he asked, with a roughness assumed to conceal his agitation, “that you’re offering me my liberty?”

“No; that I’m asking you for mine.”

“On what grounds?”

She arched her eyebrows, looking round about her comprehensively.  “I should think that was clear.  On the grounds of—­of everything.”

“That’s not enough.  So long as you can’t say that you don’t—­don’t care about me any more—­”

There was that possibility.  It was very faint, but if she made use of it he should consider it decisive.  Doing precisely the right thing would become quite another course of action if her heart rejected him.  But she spoke promptly.

“I can’t say that; but I can say something more important.”

He nodded firmly.  “That settles it, by Jove.  I sha’n’t give you up.  There’s no reason for it.  So long as we love each other—­”

“Our loving each other wouldn’t make your refusal any the less hard for me.  As your wife I should be trying to fill a position for which I’m no longer qualified and in which I should be a failure.”

“As my wife,” he said, slowly, with significant deliberation, “we could make the position anything you felt able to fill.”

She considered this.  “That is, you could send in your papers and retire into private life.”

“If we liked.”

“So that you’d be choosing between your career—­and me.”

“I object to the way of putting it.  If my career, as you call it, didn’t make you happy, you should have whatever would do the trick.”