' I am sorry,' she said; ' I quite forgot to tell you. The thing seemed to me immaterial. Of course, I should have consulted you before settling anything.'
Bertie felt rather ashamed of his ill-temper, and, remembering the omission of their usual little ceremony, he picked up her hand as it lay on the arm of her chair, and pressed it.
' Yes, dear, I am stupid to have made anything of it,' he said. ' But tell me, Amelie, what is the proposed line?'
' A branch line from Cardiff, joining the Liverpool and Southampton. It is only a preliminary survey, I believe. Of course, I meant to talk to you about it as soon as they opened negotiations with us; I may as well now. It will cross the far warren for about a mile, I believe, and then tunnel under the ridge. It will not interfere with us in any way. It is completely cut off from the house and the woods. And I suppose they would pay something substantial. I had meant to give you that.'
Bertie's feeling of shame grew a little hotter.
' I am a cross-grained brute,' he said. ' Am I forgiven?'
She smiled at him.
' Do you ask that?' she said. ' But oh, Bertie, don't hurt me even ever so little. A little hurt from you hurts so much.'
So another cloud flecked the blue of June.
That afternoon their guests began to arrive for the weekend party. It was the first they had given, and Amelie somehow felt a little nervous, for it was her début as hostess. Lord Bolton was coming, and, in a way, it seemed to her hardly decent that she should be receiving him in this house. She had met him once or twice before, and was vaguely terrified at him. Sybil Massington was coming too, with Charlie, to whom she was to be married in July. Ginger was accompanying his father; other friends of Bertie's raised their numbers to a dozen, and both her own
