The arrangements for breakfast at Hartling were in keeping with Arthur's early estimate of the place as a first-class hotel. The members of the family came down when they chose, and between eight and ten o'clock there were rarely more than two people in the breakfast-room at the same time. Miss Kenyon and Hubert came first. Hubert had a habit of getting up at six in the summer, and Miss Kenyon was a precisian. Arthur succeeded them between half-past eight and nine and sometimes had his aunt for a companion. The other four straggled in uncertainly—Joe Kenyon or his sister was always the last—and occasionally their meals overlapped. So much Arthur knew from experience, and as he had never seen Eleanor in the morning, he had inferred that she probably breakfasted with her grandfather upstairs.
He was greatly surprised, therefore, to find her at the table when he entered the room at half-past eight the next morning, surprised and for a minute or two distinctly embarrassed. He was never now in the mood for conversation so early in the day.
Until he had come to Hartling he had always been fresh and eager in the morning, but the Kenyons were taciturn and inclined to be irritable at that time, and by degrees their example had influenced him. He presumed that it was their example, but he was not sure whether or not he could attribute to the same source the sense of dissatisfaction with himself that commonly haunted
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 him now when he first woke; dissatisfaction and a strange feeling of staleness and of disinclination to begin his easy, amusing day.
He addressed her as he might have addressed a casual acquaintance in a hotel.
"Don't often see you down here in the morning," he remarked vapidly, as he rang the bell.
"I've been given a holiday to-day," she said, without looking up. "And I was to tell you that you needn't go up this morning. My grandfather says he's feeling a little tired."
"He had rather an exciting day," Arthur agreed; investigated the cold dishes on the sideboard, and then crossed the room and sat down opposite her.
Eleanor went on quietly with her breakfast. She seemed prepared, he thought, to sit there in silence for the rest of the meal, while he on his part could think of no reasonably intelligent conversation. After the interval provided by the entrance of the butler, however, an opening presented itself to him.
"What are you going to do with your holiday?" he asked. "It'll be rather too wet for tennis, won't it?"
"I'm going for a long walk into Sussex," she said.
His first thought was that he would now find no opportunity for a quiet talk alone with her that day.
"All alone?" he asked.
"I long to be alone, sometimes," she murmured.
"It seems to me that you spend most of your time alone," he said. "We don't see much of you." She looked up at him with an expression that seemed to indicate both surprise and disappointment. "One can never be alone in the house," she said.
He did not understand. "Are you always with your grandfather?" he asked.
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She shook her head and looked down again at her plate, as she said, "I meant that I couldn't think my own thoughts here."
"And what do you think about when you're out all by yourself in Sussex?" he inquired. He felt that his tone was not right, that it held a suggestion of the jocular; but he felt shy and ill at ease, afraid of being too serious.
"Just my own thoughts," she said quietly.
He wanted to say something rather profound to show that he understood and sympathised, but every sentence he tried over in his mind appeared trivial and banal. He kept his head down as he muttered finally. "I've often wondered what you think about things."
She made no reply to that, and he was afraid to look at her. His speech had sounded rather surly, he thought, and with the idea of amending it, he continued, "I mean that every one seems to take things for granted here, except you."
"What sort of things?" she asked in a low voice.
"Oh, well! speculations about life in general," he tried.
"Yes, I don't think any of us are much given to that sort of thing," she replied.
There had been some effect of a smile in her tone as she spoke, and he looked up and saw that she was indeed smiling, if a trifle ruefully.
"Not even you?" he asked.
She disregarded the implied flattery that distinguished her from all the other members of the family. "Have you done much speculating about life in general since you've been here?" she returned.
He had hardly begun his breakfast yet, but he laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. "I wish you would let me come with you
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 to-day," he said. "There are a heap of things I want to talk to you about. I know you don't like me, but it would be a real kindness if you would let me talk to you a little sometimes. There's simply no one here I can explain things to."
"Why me?" she replied.
"You're so different from all the others," he said.
"And are you?" she asked.
"Different from the others?" he repeated, staggered by the suggestion that he could be thought to resemble, in any particular, the other members of the Hartling circle.
"Yes," she prompted him quietly.
He stared at her frowning. "Am I the least like them?" he inquired with a faint trepidation in his voice.
"Not yet, perhaps; but you will be," she said.
"But they aren't like each other," he remonstrated. "Which of them shall I be like if I stay long enough, Uncle Joe, or Mr Turner, or Hubert ...?"
"Aren't they all rather alike in one way?" she asked.
He saw at once that they were; that there was some characteristic common to every one of them, even Miss Kenyon. Seen as individuals they were as different from each other as are the ears of wheat in a cornfield, but they all bowed the same way to the prevailing wind. In their attitude towards the head of the house they could all be relied upon to present the same face.
"But you've been here fourteen years," he said, "and you're still different. Or do you think it takes longer than that to get assimilated?"
"I'm not different," she replied. "Or I shouldn't be here still."
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"Of course, I don't know you," he said. "I've hardly seen you since the first three or four days I was here. But—well—I can't agree with you about that."
She just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders.
"You haven't said whether you will let me come with you on your walk," he began again, after a short pause.
"I would sooner you didn't," she told him. "It can't do any good. There can be nothing new that you want to ask my advice about. I said all I had to say to you about that five weeks ago, and you took no notice. I can only repeat what I said then."
"But I can't go now," he protested. "I've given my promise. I made a sort of bargain in fact."
She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't keep it," she said.
"That's absurd," he remonstrated, getting to his feet. "Of course I must keep my promise in any circumstances."
"I suppose you do really believe that?" she asked, looking up at him. "Would you keep it just the same, for instance, if you knew for certain that it meant staying on here for ten years and getting nothing, absolutely nothing, at the end of it? Would you, honestly? Or don't you think you'd ask to be let off?"
"I might ask to be let off," he admitted, after a few seconds' thought.
"Then you'll only be keeping your promise or bargain or whatever it is because you want to stay—or because you've got to," she said.
"Perhaps," he agreed. "But I've never said that I didn't want to stay. I do."
She sighed. "Precisely, and now we're back again
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 to what I said just now. Whatever is the good of talking to me about it?"
"We might talk about other things," he suggested. "I should very much like to get away, too, for a few hours."
She hid her face in her hands, leaning her elbows on the table, and he waited patiently for her answer.
"Why don't you finish your breakfast?" she asked, when she looked up after what seemed to him a long interval of silence.
"I have. I don't want anything more," he said.
She got up then, and he thought she was going to leave him without deigning to take any further notice of his request, but when she was half-way across the room, she looked back and said, "Can you be ready in ten minutes?"
He started forward with the eagerness of a dog beckoned by its mistress. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, hardly understanding his own excitement.
She stood still regarding him with an expression that was half-amused and half-disdainful. "I didn't know you were so keen on long walks," she remarked, "or on getting away from here. Isn't this rather a new departure for you?"
The look of eagerness left his face. "Perhaps it is," he said stiffly. "And it's hardly likely to be much of a success if—if you're going to take that sort of tone."
"I told you that I didn't want you to come," she replied, and there was something of defiance in her tone and in the pose of her firm, upright figure.
"I should at least like to know why you have taken such a dislike to me," he said. "But you might not feel inclined to tell me that in any case."
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"Oh! dislike," she responded, almost contemptuously. "That's much too strong a word."
He had a sense of hopeless frustration. All her half-unwilling responses appeared now to have been nothing more than a condescension to his ineptitude. And he was all too horribly conscious of the fact that he deserved nothing better than her contemptuous opinion of him. He was just an average young man of twenty-eight. He had done nothing that thousands of other young men had not done as well or better. The only boast he could have made would have been that of ambition, a boast that was no longer possible for him after his recent admission that he meant to stay on at Hartling and liked being there. He knew intuitively what her reply would be, if he told her that he meant to study, to prepare himself for the work of a specialist. Indeed, he himself saw that project, now, as little more than a fatuous piece of self-deception. Practice was what he wanted: book-work would be no good without that. And in five years he would be soft and over-fed; his nerve would be gone.
He looked down and began to trace the pattern of the carpet with his toe. "Yes, I'm not worth hating," he muttered.
She turned away with a gesture of impatience. "Well, shall you be ready in ten minutes?" she threw at him over her shoulder.
"But if you would so much sooner I didn't come ..." he conceded humbly.
"I'll meet you in the hall," she said, as she went out.
He hesitated again while he was putting on his shoes. If she merely despised him, as she obviously did, what was the use of trying to win her confidence? Nothing he could say or do would alter
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 her opinion of him. He had nothing to say. There was nothing he could do. The most he could hope for would be to defend his position by argument. He had little doubt that her contempt for him was based on the fact that he had consented to stay on at Hartling; and it might be well that she had not, as yet, a proper understanding of his reasons. She might not have heard of his verbal compact with the family made the previous day? Was it worth while attempting his own defence?
He was still weighing that question when she joined him in the hall. He continued to weigh it as they walked together in silence down the length of the garden.
The clouds were lifting, and before they reached the big gates the sun broke through. He looked up, noted the promise of a hot, fine day, and his spirits began to rise. What did it matter whether or not she despised him? He was a free man. He was not in any way dependent upon her opinion. If she chose to snub him, he could leave her to continue her walk alone. He could be perfectly happy without her. He was twenty-eight, in perfect health, and without a care in the world. Why shouldn't he enjoy life in his own way? If he had a regret at that moment, it was that he had eaten hardly any breakfast.
He began to whistle softly under his breath. He had no intention of beginning the conversation. He was content to enjoy the day and the adventure of this walk—the first he had undertaken since he had come to Hartling. Except for the path to the links and the links themselves, he knew nothing of the country round about. None of the family ever seemed to bother about going outside the
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 grounds. They had this amazing garden and were, presumably, satisfied with that.
How little Eleanor was satisfied with it, however, was shown the moment they passed through the gates into the dusty high-road. She set back her shoulders, lifted her head, and gave a sigh of relief. "It's going to be fine, after all," she said. "I think we'll strike across country to a place I know where we can look right over to the South Downs. It's so big and open there."
There was no hint of embarrassment or restraint in her manner. She might have forgotten everything that had passed between them that morning; and Arthur, on his side, was quite willing to postpone his arguments and explanations, or even to omit them altogether. If she were going to treat him decently for the time being, that was all he asked.
"Sounds jolly," he said.
"It's seven or eight miles," she warned him.
"Oh! that's nothing," he returned. "I'm good for all that and more. But are you?"
"I've done it twice in the last ten days," she said.
"This holiday of yours is not altogether an exception to the general rule, then?" he asked.
"I've been out several times—lately," she admitted.
He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?"
She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind.
They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow
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 lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead.
Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though."
"We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?"
He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind."
"Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about—being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't."
She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war.
"I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess—Elizabeth and I shared a governess then—not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone
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 if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness.
"But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said.
"I might have been a nurse," she protested.
"If you had you couldn't have come in till right at the end," he returned, "and, Lord, we had quite enough amateurs at that game as it was. Though, as it happens, it crossed my mind that you would make a good nurse the first time I saw you."
"I believe I should, too," she agreed. "I hope I may be some day."
He made no comment on that though he was aware that something within him resented the thought of her ever becoming a professional nurse.
"You did go through the war, at all events," she went on, rather as if she sought an excuse for him.
"I, and about five million other men," he put in, determined to take no credit on that score.
"It makes a difference, all the same," she returned.
"To what?" he asked.
"Oh! everything comes back to the same place," she said, looking out straight in front of her. "I knew it would, when you asked to come with me. When I'm alone I'm dishonest enough to forget—deliberately. I can—generally. I lose myself in other thoughts."
"Meaning that I'm spoiling your day," he put in. "But I don't see why we should talk about—that—if you'd sooner not. I can forget too."
"No, no, we must talk about it," she said, "only I find it so difficult to begin. There are some things
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—one thing at all events that you don't know and that I find it very hard to tell you. But let's wait until after lunch. You had no breakfast, and I know a funny little lost place on our way, where we can get something to eat. It won't be anything but ham and eggs, and bread and cheese, of course."
Arthur felt that he wanted nothing better just then, and said so.
"Afterwards," she concluded, "we will go to that place where you look across to the South Downs, and—and—have it all out."
He was quite content with that. Whatever "having it all out" might portend, she was treating him now frankly and with a certain confidence. Her manner since they had left Hartling behind them, had completely changed. She might presently criticise him in a way that he would find intolerable. They might openly quarrel. But anything would be better to endure than that air of contempt and reserve she had displayed at breakfast. He would, at least, be given the opportunity to defend himself. He felt sure that she had not understood his attitude, as yet.
Their immediate difficulty was to find a topic of conversation that would avoid any kind of reference to the affairs of Hartling, and a few experiments further demonstrated how the thought of those affairs was, just then, obsessing them to the exclusion of all other interests. All that seemed possible were disjointed scraps of comment upon the scenery, or the wild flowers and ferns of that luxuriant Sussex country—until they reached Eleanor's little wayside inn, and could drop into the familiar interchanges of two rather hungry young people awaiting the inevitable fried ham and eggs that was being prepared for them.
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The inn lay in a valley, and as soon as they finished their meal, Eleanor pointed to the hill in front of them.
"We have to climb that and then we are there," she said. "Shall we go now?"
Arthur agreed willingly enough. He was both eager and apprehensive; at once anxious to hear what she had to say and a little fearful of the effect. So long as they could walk together in silence he had a pleasant feeling of content in her company. Surely she liked him better since they had been alone together? She had not given the least sign of despising him in the course of the past two hours.
Yet even when they had reached the summit of the hill that marked the limit of their journey, Eleanor still hesitated.
She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky.
Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important
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 issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life.
They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,—
"Well, shall we talk now and—and get it over?"
She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,—
"We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same—perhaps for years and years."
"In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this—this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope."
"It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling."
He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; why?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension.
"Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to—to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply,
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 "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?"
He waited for a few seconds after she had finished before he said quietly, "I ought to have guessed really; but I didn't. He said something to me about it yesterday morning—that he had hoped you and I would be friends, or something of the sort."
"And you, what did you say?" she put in.
"I told him that I was afraid you didn't like me, and then he said that in that case there was nothing more to be done. We didn't mention it again. It was before I told him about Hubert."
"Though, whether I like you or not has nothing whatever to do with it, of course," she commented thoughtfully.
"Hasn't it?" he asked, as if he doubted that inference.
"Nothing whatever," she insisted.
"Still if—I mean—it seems to me that ..." he began; but she cut him short by saying with an impatient lift of her chin,—
"I know what you mean, perfectly well. You needn't try to put it into words. That isn't really the point at all."
"What is the point then?" he asked in bewilderment. "I may be frightfully stupid, but I can't quite see...."
She turned her face still farther away from him
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 as she said in a scarcely audible voice, "Nothing should ever induce me to be a bait for you."
A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them.
"You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to—throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction.
"Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly.
"But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?"
"He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you—you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he—he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's—oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him.
"Oh! surely not," Arthur protested.
She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said.
"He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically.
"Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time.
"Something," he acknowledged.
"Did he tell you how my father pleaded with
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 him, offered to do or to be anything, if only he might be allowed to marry my mother?"
Arthur shook his head. "No, he didn't tell me that. What was his objection?" he said.
"My father never knew—unless it was that my mother had no money of her own. I only know what Uncle Joe told me, of course, but he heard all about it at the time. I don't believe that he had any real objection. You can never be sure whether he will say yes or no to anything, but you may be quite certain whichever it is, that he will stick to it afterwards whatever happens. And he said 'No' to my father, and turned him out of the house because he was willing to give up anything in the world rather than my mother. And when he had been gone about a month he sent that elephant's foot that stands in the hall. He meant it as an insult. Uncle Joe says that they were afraid to tell him. They all knew what it meant, of course; that it was a sort of symbol of his methods. But he wasn't the least bit insulted. He seemed to be proud of it, and had it put where it is now, for every one to see."
She had been speaking rapidly, almost fiercely, with an excitement completely unlike her usual rather staid manner.
"But why have you gone on staying there if you feel like that?" Arthur asked.
She put her hands up to her face for a moment and then looked at him with a whimsical smile. "You aren't the only person who has been blind," she said.
"Do you mean that you have only been feeling like that just lately?" he asked.
"I was only seven when I came," she said, "and I was brought up there. I never went to school.
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 And you take things for granted when you're brought up in a place because it's the only world you know, and you think the others must be much about the same. I did begin to wake up a little in the last year of the war, but even then it all seemed natural enough in a way. He was so old, and one made all sorts of excuses for him. And then, of course, for months or even years at a time he seems to be as sweet and gentle as any one could be. He can be most awfully kind to people...." She paused on a reflective note, as if she still sought excuses for him.
"But what happened to make you change y............