said that he was lonely.

Canterton filled his pipe, keeping a humorously expectant eye fixed on one particular opening in the yew hedge. There are people and things whose arrival may be counted on as inevitable, and Canterton was in the act of striking a match when he saw his wife enter the rosery. She came through the yew hedge with that characteristic scurry of hers suggesting the indefatigable woman of affairs in a hurry, her chin poking forward, the curve of her neck exaggerating the intrusive stoop of her shoulders.

Gertrude Canterton was dressed for some big function, and she had chosen primrose, the very colour that she should not have worn. Her large black hat with its sable feather sat just at the wrong angle; wisps of hair straggled at the back of her neck, and one of her gloves was split between the fingers. Her dress hinted at a certain fussy earnestness, an impatience of patience before mirrors, or perhaps an unconscious contempt for such reflectors of trifles. She was tall, narrow across the shoulders, and distinguished by a pallid strenuousness that was absolutely lacking in any spirit of repose. Her face was too big, and colourless, and the nose too broad and inquisitive about the nostrils. It was a face that seemed to grow larger and larger when she had talked anyone into a corner, looming up, white, and earnest and egotistical through a fog of words, the chin poking forward, the pale eyes set in a stare. She had a queer habit of wriggling her shoulders when she entered a room full of people, a trick that seemed strange in a woman of so much self-conceit.

“James! Oh, there you are! You must know how busy I am!”

Canterton lit his pipe.

“You are the busiest woman I know.”

“It’s a quarter to three, and I have to open the fête at three. And the men are not up at the house. I told Lavender——”

“Yes, no doubt. But we happen to be very busy here.”

His wife elevated her eyebrows.

“James, do you mean to say——”

“The men are not going.”

“But I told Lavender——”

He looked at her with an imperturbable good humour that knew perfectly well how to hold its own.

“Lavender comes to me for instructions. There are some things, Gertrude, that you don’t quite understand. It is now just ten minutes to three.”

The wife shrugged her shoulders over the hopelessness of this eccentric male. For the moment she was intensely irritated, being a woman with a craze for managing everybody and everything, and for striking the dominant note in the community in which she happened to live.

“Well, I think it is abominable——”

“What?”

“Making me look foolish, and keeping these men at work, when I had arranged for them to go to the fête. The whole neighbourhood will be represented. We have made a particular effort to get all the working people——”

Canterton remained genial and undisturbed.

“I think I told you that more than half the men are Radicals.”

“All the more reason for getting into touch with them.”

“Voluntarily, perhaps. The men were needed here.”

“But I had seen Lavender——”

“I don’t want to hurry you, but if you are to be there at three——”

She jerked her head, twitching her black hat farther off her forehead.

“Sometimes you are impossible. You won’t interest yourself in life, and you won’t let others be interested.”

“I’m not quite so bad as that, Gertrude. I am no good at social affairs. You have the genius for all that.”

“Exactly. But even in the matter of helping things on. Well, it is no use talking to you. I promised Lady Marchendale that I would be on the platform by three.”

“You haven’t much time.”

“No, I haven’t.”

She let him see that she despaired of his personality, and walked off towards the house, a long, thin, yellow figure, like a vibrating wire that was always a blurr of egotistical energy. She was angry, with the pinched and cold anger of a thin-natured woman. James was impossible, only fit to be left like a great bear among his trees and shrubs. Besides he had made her look a fool. These sixty men were to have followed her carriage, an impressive body of retainers tramping after her into Lady Marchendale’s grounds.

Neither Guinevere the rose, nor the purpose of Canterton’s day had been so much as noticed. He was always busy watching something, studying the life cycle of some pest, scanning the world of growth in the great nursery, and Gertrude Canterton was not interested in flowers, which meant that she was outside the world of her husband’s life. These two people, though living in the same house, were absolute strangers to each other. The book of their companionship had been closed long ago, and had never been reopened. The great offence had arisen when James Canterton had chosen to become the professional artist and trader. His wife had never forgiven him that step. It had seemed so unnecessary, so vulgar, so exasperatingly irrational to a woman who was essentially a snob. From that time Gertrude Canterton had begun to excuse her husband to the world, to shrug her shoulders at him as an eccentric creature, to let her friends understand that Canterton was one of those abnormal people who are best left alone in their own peculiar corner. She never understood him, and never attempted to understand him, being too busy with her multifarious publicities to grasp the bigness and the beauty of this quiet man’s mind.

Gertrude Canterton had a restless passion for managing things and people, and for filling her life with a conviction that she was indispensable. Her maternal instinct seemed to have become a perverted passion for administration. She was a Guardian of the Poor, Dame President of the local Primrose League Habitation, Secretary of the Basingford Coal and Clothing Club, Treasurer of the District Nurses Fund, an enthusiastic National Service Leaguer, on the committee of a convalescent home for London children that had been built within three miles of Basingford, a lecturer on Eugenics, a strenuous advocate of the Red Cross campaign, also a violent anti-Suffragist. She had caught a whole collection of the age’s catch-cries, and used them perpetually with eager emphasis. “The woman’s place is the home.” “We must begin with the children.” “Help, but not pauperisation.” “The Ideal of the Empire.” “The segregation of the unfit.” She wanted to manage everybody, and was tacitly disliked by everybody, save by a select few, who considered her to be a remarkable and a very useful woman.

At three minutes past three Gertrude Canterton was on the platform in the marquee in Lady Marchendale’s grounds, and making the short speech with which she was to open the Primrose League fête. Short speeches did not accord with Gertrude Canterton’s methods of persuasion. She always had a very great deal to say, enjoyed saying it, and never paused to wonder whether people wanted to listen to her opinions. She spoke for twenty minutes in her thin and metallic voice, eagerly and earnestly, and keeping up that queer, sinuous wriggling of the trunk and shoulders that had made some wag christen her “The Earnest Eel.”

The country crowd was bored after the first five minutes. Lord Parallax was to speak later, and the people had grown too accustomed to listening to Mrs. Canterton. There were a number of children sandwiched in among their