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“You are very frank, Lady Susan.”

“I am a great deal too frank; everybody says so. It comes of having nothing whatever to do.” She smiled, rather unexpectedly, and quite sweetly. “I like you. It is a thing I do not often say. I should be sorry to think you were making a mistake, in either direction.”

It was in the course of the drive back to town, in the long light, that Marianne, who had come down with the Colonel to fetch her sister, and was seated opposite, found herself addressed by Mr. Grant, who had ridden beside the carriage and, at some point, had leaned down to the window.

“Mrs. Brandon,” said he, very low. “May I say something? I am afraid I do not know what I am to do.”

“I am listening.”

“I have asked her — that is to say, I have not asked her — but I have said as much as a man may say without saying it; and she says she wants something more. I said, more what? I have offered her a house in town. I have offered her an estate in Surrey. I have offered a mammoth.” He stopped and gave a short unhappy laugh. “What in the world is there that I have not offered?”

Marianne looked at him for a long moment. It was, she thought, a very handsome, kind, honest, and rather pitiful face, and she felt for it a real and unaffected tenderness; and she was, at the same time, extremely conscious of the pressure of her own past, like a hand between her shoulders.

“Perhaps,” said she gently, “she does not care so very much for the usual things that others want.”

He did not answer. He rode beside the carriage, for some little way, with his eyes on the road; and when he raised his head, and touched his hat, and dropped back, she noticed that the smile upon his face had a curious fixed look, like a lamp with the wick turned very low.

The Tregarths’ dinner was upon the Wednesday.

It was given in the small, tall house in Bloomsbury which belonged to Simon Tregarth’s aunt, Miss Loveday Tregarth, a tiny, rigid, cheerful maiden lady of seventy, who had lived there for forty-five years and had never in that time been known to alter the position of a chair; and it was a much smaller party than anyone had supposed. There were Mr. Tregarth of Penhallow, the aunt, Morwenna, Simon, the Aylmers, and the Brook Street party, less the Colonel and Marianne, who had sent an excuse, and who filled the dining-room to the brim, and sat, at a table designed for eight, in perfect amity, and with their elbows in each other’s ribs.

It was a bad evening for Margaret. She had known that it would be. It was the eve of the Thursday on which Henry was to meet his father; she had been awake for most of the last two nights, listening to the murmur of voices in the drawing-room below, and to the low, unhappy sound of Marianne walking up and down; she had heard the whole of it, piece by piece, from her mother, in whispers, across the breakfast table; and she came into Miss Loveday’s small warm dining-room at seven o’clock, in her green silk, with her hair well done, and a bright fixed smile upon her face, in the state of a woman who has been in an earthquake and has not yet found the place to put her feet.

She got through the soup. She got through the fish. She answered the aunt, and the aunt’s cat, and Mr. Tregarth of Penhallow, who had taken a violent fancy to her at first sight and had, before the second course, extracted from his coat-tail pocket a lump of dull black stone, which he put down beside her plate with the air of a conjuror, and said:

“There, miss. Tell me what that is. Come. I have known a man from the Museum cry off at it.”

“It is cassiterite,” said Margaret, after studying it. “Black tin. It is from a lode, and I should say by the weight, and the colour, and the little brown crystal on the edge, that it is from somewhere near Redruth; it is rather rich.”

There was silence.

“Well!” said Mr. Tregarth, in a voice of deepest awe. “Well! She has done it. She has never seen it before in her life.”

“Josiah,” said the aunt.

“I beg your pardon, Loveday. I forgot myself. But I have not seen a woman do that since my poor wife, and she had it from her father; and he was a Cornish captain.” He wiped his eyes. He looked round upon the assembly with an expression of the naivest, unaffected, boyish exultation. “My boy talks of nothing else,” he announced, in the same carrying whisper. “Nothing! He is a good boy, but he thinks too little of himself. His mother died when he was nine, and he has been apologising for being alive ever since. It is all I can do to get him to say a word at table. But I see now what it was he wanted. He wanted somebody to talk to.”

“Papa,” said Simon Tregarth, in a stifled voice.

“Yes, boy.”

“Please.”

“I am only saying, boy. I am only observing.”

She laughed. She could not help it; and it was as she laughed, and the room laughed with her, and the candles wavered, and a small bright spot rose in her chest, that she found her eyes had filled, quite without her leave, and that she could not stop them. It was ridiculous. It was the most absurd and unseasonable thing; she had not cried, in that tone, since she was a child. She looked down hastily at her plate. She put up a hand, as if to smooth her hair, and, under cover of it, wiped her cheek.

“Miss Dashwood.”

It was a very low voice. It came from her left, where the younger Mr. Tregarth had been placed by his aunt’s careful arrangement, and where he had, till now, been silent; and she turned, with a start, and found that he was not looking at her at all. He was looking at his plate. He had, with an air of vague and courteous absorption, put down his fork.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Tregarth, in an undertone that could not have carried beyond his own napkin. “I do not wish to intrude. But you do not seem to be quite at ease. I wonder — would you like to go out on the leads, where it is quiet? My aunt has a small garden on the roof. Or, if you would rather, I shall talk to you about rocks.”

“Rocks,” said Margaret, quickly. “Oh, yes. Please.”

He did. He did it with the most perfect and tactful simplicity, in a low even voice, without so much as a glance in her direction, while the general conversation around them seemed to have faded away; he talked, for the whole of the remainder of the dinner, about the structure of the Cornish granite, and the way in which the tin came up through it in veins, in the heat of the young earth, like a dark thread through a piece of cloth; and he said nothing else, and asked her nothing whatever, and did not once make her look at him. It was the best thing anyone had done for her in a month. She could feel, as he talked, the tightness leave her shoulders; she felt her breath come back.

He had a way of speaking, she thought, when he was at ease. He looked at nothing. He looked, in the candlelight, at some point a long distance off, in which the granite was; and his face, which she had thought so plain, had lit, as the face of a man might who is at last describing something he loves; and it seemed to her that she had never seen a face that was so entirely without pretence.