"It would be wonderful if she got well," Claire murmured.
They talked for a while of trifles; the absence of other neighbours, the country around.
"When one gets over the spell of this lotuslike existence," she asked him, "what is there to do here--in the way of exercise, I mean?"
"Your tennis court used to be good," he said. "One of ours is quite playable and there are plenty of golf links a few miles away."
"At Norwich. Dad will tell you all about that. The hunting isn't bad. My father is master of one of the packs that hunt near here. They begin cubbing at the end of next month. The shooting parties will give you plenty of exercise too, if you are fond of walking."
"I like all these things," she admitted, a little more earnestly, "and I love this garden. The peace of it is almost stupefying. I feel somehow or other that I should like to grow old in this atmosphere."
She laughed at him. Suddenly she was serious. She leaned forward in her chair.
"In a few minutes," she said, "I must go in to see Madame. Before you leave, though, I want to ask you just one thing. What was the chief reason which made you in the first instance come over to China on that mad adventure?"
"But why do you need money? You have the most beautiful home I ever saw."
He laughed with a bitterness which he took no pains to conceal.
"It is to keep that home," he explained, "that we need money. Perhaps you scarcely understand the troubles that a certain class of English people have had to face lately, especially people who come of extravagant stock, like my father and me. It wasn't pure love of adventure that took me out to China. It was the hope of saving Ballaston if I succeeded."
"Is it really as bad as that?" she asked sympathetically.
"Worse," he rejoined. "I believe that my father has finally made up his mind that there is no chance of saving the place."
She was thoughtful for several moments, affected even perhaps more than she realised by the note of dejection in his tone. His enterprise, which had presented itself before to her imagination as a sort of buccaneering feat, not exactly reprehensible but faintly tinged with sordidness, suddenly showed itself in a new light. She realised alike the chivalry of it and the pathos, and how near he had been to success.