On their return, somewhat low-spirited, from Montefiascone, Mrs. Aldwinkle and her party found Mary Thriplow alone in the palace.

'And Calamy?' Mrs. Aldwinkle inquired.

'He's gone into the mountains,' said Miss Thriplow in a serious, matter-of-fact voice.

'Why?'

'He felt like that,' Mary answered. 'He wanted to be alone to think. I understand it so well. The prospect of your return filled him almost with terror. He went off two or three days ago.'

'Into the mountains?' echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'Is he sleeping in the woods, or in a cave, or something of that kind?'

'He's taken a room in a peasant's cottage on the road up to the marble quarries. It's a lovely place.'

'This sounds most interesting,' said Mr. Cardan. 'I must really climb up and have a look at him.'

'I'm sure he'd rather you didn't,' said Miss Thriplow. 'He wants to be left alone. I understand it so well,' she repeated.

Mr. Cardan looked at her curiously; her face expressed a bright and serious serenity. 'I'm surprised that you too don't retire from the world,' he said, twinkling. He had not felt as cheerful as this since before the dismal day of poor Grace's funeral.

Miss Thriplow smiled a Christian smile. 'You think it's a joke,' she said, shaking her head. 'But it isn't really, you know.'

'I'm sure it isn't,' Mr. Cardan made haste to protest. 'And believe me, I never meant to imply that it was. Never, on my word. I merely said--quite seriously, I assure you--that I was surprised that you too...'

'Well, you see, it doesn't seem to me necessary to go away bodily,' Miss Thriplow explained. 'It's always seemed to me that one can live the hermit's life, if one wants to, in the heart of London, anywhere.'

'Quite,' said Mr. Cardan. 'You're perfectly right.'

'I think he might have waited till I came back,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle rather resentfully. 'The least he could have done was to leave a note.' She looked at Miss Thriplow angrily, as though it were she who were to blame for Calamy's impoliteness. 'Well, I must go and get out of my dusty clothes,' she added crossly, and walked away to her room. Her irritation was the disguise and public manifestation of a profound depression. They're all going, she was thinking, they're all slipping away. First Chelifer, now Calamy. Like all the rest. Mournfully she looked back over her life. Everybody, everything had always slipped away from her. She had always missed all the really important, exciting things; they had invariably happened, somehow, just round the corner, out of her sight. The days were so short, so few now. Death approached, approached. Why had Cardan brought that horrible imbecile creature to die in front of her like that? She didn't want to be reminded of death. Mrs. Aldwinkle shuddered. I'm getting old, she thought; and the little clock on the mantel-piece, ticking away in the silence of her huge room, took up the refrain: Getting old, getting old, getting old, it repeated again and again, endlessly. Getting old--Mrs. Aldwinkle looked at herself in the glass--and that electric massage machine hadn't arrived. True, it was on its way; but it would be weeks before it got here. The posts were so slow. Everything conspired against her. If she had had it before, if she'd looked younger... who knew? Getting old, getting old, repeated the little clock. In a couple of days from now Chelifer would be going back to England; he'd go away, he'd live apart from her, live such a wonderful, beautiful life. She'd miss it all. And Calamy had already gone; what was he doing, sitting there in the mountains? He was thinking wonderful thoughts, thoughts that might hold the secret she had always been seeking and had never found, thoughts that might bring the consolation and tranquillity of which she always so sorely stood in need. She was missing them, she'd never know them. Getting old, getting old. She took off her hat and tossed it on to the bed. It seemed to her that she was the unhappiest woman in the world.

That evening, while she was brushing Mrs. Aldwinkle's hair, Irene, braving the dangers of Aunt Lilian's terrifying fun, screwed up her courage to say: 'I can never be grateful enough to you, Auntie, for having talked to me about Hovenden.'

'What about him?' asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, from whose mind the painful events of the last few weeks had quite obliterated such trivial memories.

Irene blushed with embarrassment. This was a question she had not anticipated. Was it really possible that Aunt Lilian could have forgotten those momentous and epoch-making words of hers? 'Why,' she began stammering, 'what you said about... I mean... when you said that he looked as though... well, as though he liked me.'

'Oh yes,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle without interest.

'Don't you remember?'

'Yes, yes,' Mrs. Aldwinkle nodded. 'What about it?'

'Well,' Irene went on, still painfully embarrassed, 'you see... that made me... that made me pay attention, if you understand.'

'Hm,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle. There was a silence. Getting old, getting old, repeated the little clock remorselessly.

Irene leaned forward and suddenly boiled over with confidences. 'I love him so much, Aunt Lilian,' she said, speaking very rapidly, 'so much, so much. It's the real thing this time. And he loves me too. And we're going to get married at the New Year, quite quietly; no fuss, no crowds shoving in on what isn't their business; quietly and sensibly in a registry office. And after that we're going in the Velox to...'

'What are you talking about?' said Mrs. Aldwinkle in a furious voice, and she turned round on her niece a face expressive of such passionate anger that Irene drew back, not merely astonished, but positively afraid. 'You don't mean to tell me,' Mrs. Aldwinkle began; but she could not find the words to continue. 'What have you two young fools been thinking about?' she got out at last.

...old, getting old; the remorseless ticking made itself heard in every silence.

From being merry and excited in its childishness Irene's face had become astonished and miserable. She was pale, her lips trembled a little as she spoke. 'But I thought you'd be glad, Aunt Lilian,' she said. 'I thought you'd be glad.'

'Glad because you're making fools of yourselves?' asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, savagely snorting.

'But it was you who first suggested,' Irene began.

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut her short, before she could say any more, with a brusqueness that might have revealed to a more practised psychologist than Irene her consciousness of being in the wrong. 'Absurd,' she said. 'I suppose you're going to tell me,' she went on sarcastically, 'that it was I who told you to marry him.'

'I know you didn't,' said Irene.

'There!' Mrs. Aldwinkle's tone was triumphant.

'But you did say you wondered why I wasn't in love...'

'Bah,' said Aunt Lilian, 'I was just making fun. Calf loves...'

'But why shouldn't I marry him?' asked Irene. 'If I love him and he loves me. Why shouldn't I?'

Why shouldn't she? Yes, that was an awkward question. Getting old, getting old, muttered the clock in the brief ensuing silence. Perhaps that was half the answer. Getting old! they were all going; first Chelifer, then Calamy, now Irene. Getting old, getting old; soon she'd be quite alone. And it wasn't only that. It was also her pride that was hurt, her love of dominion that suffered. Irene had been her slave; had worshipped her, taken her word as law, her opinions as gospel truth. Now she was transferring her allegiance. Mrs. Aldwinkle was losing a subject--losing her to a more powerful rival. It was intolerable. 'Why shouldn't you marry him?' Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated the phrase ironically two or three times, while she hunted for the answer. 'Why shouldn't you marry him?'

'Why shouldn't I?' Irene asked again. There were tears in her eyes; but however unhappy she might look, there was something determined and indomitable in her attitude, something obstinate in her expression and her tone of voice. Mrs. Aldwinkle had reason to fear her rival.

'Because you're too young,' she said at last. It was a very feeble answer; but she had been unable to think of a better one.

'But, Aunt Lilian, don't you remember? You always said that people ought to marry young. I remember so well, one time, when we talked about Juliet being only fourteen when she first saw Romeo, that you said...'

'That has nothing to do with it,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle, cutting short her niece's mnemonic display. Irene's memory, Mrs. Aldwinkle had often had reason to complain, was really too good.

'But if you said...' Irene began again.

'Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with you and Hovenden,' retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'I repeat: you're too young.'

'I'm nineteen.'

'Eighteen.'

'Practically nineteen,' Irene insisted. 'My birthday's in December.'

'Marry in haste and repent at leisure,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle, making use of any missile, even a proverb, that came ready to hand. 'At the end of six months you'll come back howling and complaining and asking me to get you out of the mess.'

'But why should I?' asked Irene. 'We love one another.'

'They all say that. You don't know your own minds.'

'But we do.'

Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly changed her tactics. 'And what makes you so anxious all at once to run away from me?' she asked. 'Can't you bear to stay with me a moment longer? Am I so intolerable and odious and... and... brutal and... She clawed at the air. 'Do you hate me so much that...'

'Aunt Lilian!' protested Irene, who had begun to cry in earnest.

Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that tactlessness, that lack of measure that were characteristic of her, went on piling question upon rhetorical question, until in the end she completely spoiled the effect she had meant to achieve, exaggerating into ludicrousness what might otherwise have been touching. 'Can't you bear me? Have I ill-treated you? Tell me. Have I bullied you, or scolded you, or... or not given you enough to eat? Tell me.'

'How can you talk like that, Aunt Lilian?' Irene dabbed her eyes with a corner of her dressing-gown. 'How can you say that I don't love you? And you were always telling me that I ought to get married,' she added, breaking out into fresh tears.

'How can I say that you don't love me?' echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'But is it true that you're longing to leave me as soon as possible? Is that true or not? I merely ask what the reason is, that's all.'

'But the reason is that we want to get married; we love each other.'

'Or that you hate me,' Mrs. Aldwinkle persisted.

'But I don't hate you, Aunt Lilian. How can you say such a thing? You know I love you.'

'And yet you're anxious to run away from me as fast as you possibly can,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'And I shall be left all alone, all alone.' Her voice trembled; she shut her eyes, she contorted her face in an effort to keep it closed and rigid. Between her eyelids the tears came welling out. 'All alone,' she repeated brokenly. Getting old, said the little clock on the mantel-piece, getting old, getting old.

Irene knelt down beside her, took her hands between her own and kissed them, pressed them against her tear-wet face. 'Aunt Lilian,' she begged, 'Aunt Lilian.'

Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.

'Don't cry,' said Irene, crying herself. She imagined that she alone was the cause of Aunt Lilian's unhappiness. In reality, she was only the pretext; Mrs. Aldwinkle was weeping over her whole life, weeping at the approach of death. In that first moment of agonized sympathy and self-reproach, Irene was on the point of declaring that she would give up Hovenden, that she would spend all her life with her Aunt Lilian. But something held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn't do, that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved Aunt Lilian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt Lilian more than Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked prophetically forward, something that had come through innumerable lives, out of the obscure depths of time, to dwell within her, held her back. The conscious and individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But consciousness and individuality--how precariously, how irrelevantly almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the darkness of her being! The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for Hovenden.

'But you won't be all alone,' she protested. 'We shall constantly be with you. You'll come and stay with us.'

The assurance did not seem to bring much consolation to Mrs. Aldwinkle. She went on crying. The clock ticked away as busily as ever.