On just such a day as this Soames had got from Irene the promise he had asked her for so often. Seated on the fallen trunk of a tree, he had promised for the twentieth time that if their marriage were not a success, she should be as free as if she had never married him!

“Do you swear it?” she had said. A few days back she had reminded him of that oath. He had answered: “Nonsense! I couldn’t have sworn any such thing!” By some awkward fatality he remembered it now. What queer things men would swear for the sake of women! He would have sworn it at any time to gain her! He would swear it now, if thereby he could touch her⁠—but nobody could touch her, she was cold-hearted!

And memories crowded on him with the fresh, sweet savour of the spring wind⁠—memories of his courtship.

In the spring of the year 1881 he was visiting his old schoolfellow and client, George Liversedge, of Branksome, who, with the view of developing his pinewoods in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth, had placed the formation of the company necessary to the scheme in Soames’ hands. Mrs. Liversedge, with a sense of the fitness of things, had given a musical tea in his honour. Later in the course of this function, which Soames, no musician, had regarded as an unmitigated bore, his eye had been caught by the face of a girl dressed in mourning, standing by herself. The lines of her tall, as yet rather thin figure, showed through the wispy, clinging stuff of her black dress, her black-gloved hands were crossed in front of her, her lips slightly parted, and her large, dark eyes wandered from face to face. Her hair, done low on her neck, seemed to gleam above her black collar like coils of shining metal. And as Soames stood looking at her, the sensation that most men have felt at one time or another went stealing through him⁠—a peculiar satisfaction of the senses, a peculiar certainty, which novelists and old ladies call “love at first sight.” Still stealthily watching her, he at once made his way to his hostess, and stood doggedly waiting for the music to cease.