watch them go and to welcome them home.

Then the fact that he was a trained artist, which most of his friends had
forgotten, became significant again for Helena's benefit. She had some
aptitude, and more ambition--would indeed, but for the war, have been a
South Kensington student, and had long cherished yearnings for the Slade.
He set her work to do during the week, and corrected it with professional
sharpness when he reappeared.

And more important perhaps than either the riding or the drawing, was the
partial relaxation for her benefit of the reserve and taciturnity which
had for years veiled the real man from those who liked and respected him
most. He never indeed talked of himself or his past; but he would discuss
affairs, opinions, books--especially on their long rides together--with a
frankness, and a tone of gay and equal comradeship, which, or so Mrs.
Friend imagined, had had a disarming and rather bewildering effect on
Helena. The girl indeed seemed often surprised and excited. It was
evident that they had never got on during her mother's lifetime, and that
his habitual bantering or sarcastic tone towards her while she was still
in the school-room had roused an answering resentment in her. Hence the
aggressive mood in which, after two or three months of that half-mad
whirl of gaiety into which London had plunged after the Armistice, she
had come down to Beechmark.

They still jarred, sometimes seriously; Helena was often provocative and
aggressive; and Buntingford could make a remark sting without intending
it. But on the whole Lucy Friend felt that she was watching something
which had in it possibilities of beauty; indeed of a rather touching and
rare development. But not at all as the preliminary to a love-affair. In
Buntingford's whole relation to his ward, Lucy Friend, at least, had