They had met, they had talked, they had looked, in a conventionally light-hearted way, but both were relieved when circumstances parted them.

The strain was too great.
Pine arranged the circumstances, for hearing here, there, and everywhere, that his wife had been practically engaged to her cousin before he became her husband, he looked with jealous eyes upon their chance meetings.

Neither to Agnes nor Lambert did he say a single word, since he had no reason to utter it, so scrupulously correct was their behavior, but his eyes were sufficiently eloquent to reveal his jealousy.

He took his wife for an American tour, and when he brought her back to London, Lambert, knowing only too truly the reason for that tour, had gone away in his turn to shoot big game in Africa.

An attack of malaria contracted in the Congo marshes had driven him back to England, and it was then that he had begged Garvington to give him The Abbot's Wood Cottage.