The Dennants lived at Holm Oaks, within six miles of Oxford, and two days later he drove over and paid a call.  Amidst the avocations of reading for the Bar, of cricket, racing, shooting, it but required a whiff of some fresh scent—­hay, honeysuckle, clover—­to bring Antonia’s face before him, with its uncertain colour and its frank, distant eyes.  But two years passed before he again saw her.  Then, at an invitation from Bernard Dennant, he played cricket for the Manor of Holm Oaks against a neighbouring house; in the evening there was dancing oh the lawn.  The fair hair was now turned up, but the eyes were quite unchanged.  Their steps went together, and they outlasted every other couple on the slippery grass.  Thence, perhaps, sprang her respect for him; he was wiry, a little taller than herself, and seemed to talk of things that interested her.  He found out she was seventeen, and she found out that he was twenty-nine.  The following two years Shelton went to Holm Oaks whenever he was asked; to him this was a period of enchanted games, of cub-hunting, theatricals, and distant sounds of practised music, and during it Antonia’s eyes grew more friendly and more curious, and his own more shy, and schooled, more furtive and more ardent.  Then came his father’s death, a voyage round the world, and that peculiar hour of mixed sensations when, one March morning, abandoning his steamer at Marseilles, he took train for Hyeres.

He found her at one of those exclusive hostelries amongst the pines where the best English go, in common with Americans, Russian princesses, and Jewish families; he would not have been shocked to find her elsewhere, but he would have been surprised.  His sunburnt face and the new beard, on which he set some undefined value, apologetically displayed, were scanned by those blue eyes with rapid glances, at once more friendly and less friendly.  “Ah!” they seemed to say, “here you are; how glad I am!  But—­what now?”

He was admitted to their sacred table at the table d’hote, a snowy oblong in an airy alcove, where the Honourable Mrs. Dennant, Miss Dennant, and the Honourable Charlotte Penguin, a maiden aunt with insufficient lungs, sat twice a day in their own atmosphere.  A momentary weakness came on Shelton the first time he saw them sitting there at lunch.  What was it gave them their look of strange detachment?  Mrs. Dennant was bending above a camera.

“I’m afraid, d’ you know, it’s under-exposed,” she said.

“What a pity!  The kitten was rather nice!” The maiden aunt, placing the knitting of a red silk tie beside her plate, turned her aspiring, well-bred gaze on Shelton.

“Look, Auntie,” said Antonia in her clear, quick voice, “there’s the funny little man again!”

“Oh,” said the maiden aunt—­a smile revealed her upper teeth; she looked for the funny little man (who was not English)—­“he’s rather nice!”

Shelton did not look for the funny little man; he stole a glance that barely reached Antonia’s brow, where her eyebrows took their tiny upward slant at the outer corners, and her hair was still ruffled by a windy walk.  From that moment he became her slave.