She looked at Peter and laughed, and he laughed back.  The cloud of sullenness had lifted from his brow as she appeared.

Mrs. Hewel overwhelmed him with unnecessary apologies.  She could not grasp the fact that her polite conversation was as dull and unmeaning to the young man as Sarah’s indiscreet nothings were interesting and delightful.

“I’m sure I don’t mind,” said Peter; and his tone was quite alert and cheerful.  “She told me the country kept her awake.  If she doesn’t like it, why does she come?”

“She has come to fetch me away,” said Sarah.  “And she came unexpectedly, because she wanted to see for herself whether mamma was really ill, or whether she was only shamming.”

“Sarah!”

“And she has decided she is only shamming,” said Sarah.  “Unluckily, mamma happened to be down in the stables, doctoring Venus.  You remember Venus, her pet spaniel?”

“Of course.”

“Nothing else would have taken me off my sofa, where I ought to be lying at this moment, as you know very well, Sarah,” cried Mrs. Hewel, showing an inclination to shed tears.

“To be sure you ought,” said Sarah; “but what is the use of telling Aunt Elizabeth that, when she saw you with her own eyes racing up and down the stable-yard, with a piece of raw meat in your hand, and Venus galloping after you.”

“The vet said that if she took no exercise she would die,” said Mrs. Hewel, tearfully, “and neither he nor Jones could get her to move.  Not even Ash, though he has known her all her life.  I know it was very bad for me; but what could I do?”

“I wish I had been there,” said Sarah, giggling; “but, however, Aunt Elizabeth described it all to me so graphically this morning that it is almost as good as though I had been.”

“She should not have come down like that, without giving us a notion,” said Mrs. Hewel, resentfully.

“If she had only warned us, you could have been lying on a sofa, with the blinds down, and I could have been holding your hand and shaking a medicine-bottle,” said Sarah.  “That is how she expected to find us, she said, from your letters.”

“I am sure I scarcely refer to my weak health in my letters,” said Mrs. Hewel, plaintively, “and it is natural I should like my only daughter to be with me now and then.  Aunt Elizabeth has never had a child herself, and cannot understand the feelings of a mother.”

Sarah and Peter exchanged a fleeting glance.  She shrugged her shoulders slightly, and Peter looked at his boots.  They understood each other perfectly.

Freshly to the recollection of both rose the lamentations of a little red-haired girl, banished from the Eden of her beloved home, and condemned to a cheap German school.  Mrs. Hewel, in her palmiest days, had never found it necessary to race up and down the stable-yard to amuse Sarah; and when her only daughter developed scarlatina, she had removed herself and her spaniels from home for months to escape infection.