How quickly, how surprisingly, she recovered her spirits!  She had looked so weary and sad as she came down the stairs an hour ago.  Now she was almost gay.  A feverish and unnatural gaiety, no doubt; but those flushed cheeks, and glittering blue eyes—­how they restored the youthful loveliness of the face he had once thought the most beautiful he ever saw!

“I am going to see the last of my boy.  You’ll understand, won’t you?  You were an only son too.  And your mother would have gone to the ends of the earth to look upon your face once more, wouldn’t she?  Mothers are made like that.”

“Some mothers,” said John; and he turned away his head.

“Not yours?  I’m sorry,” said Lady Mary, simply.

“Oh, well—­you know, she was a good deal—­in the world,” he said, repenting himself.

“I use to wish so much to live in the world too,” said Lady Mary, dreamily; “but ever since I was fifteen I’ve lived in this out-of-the-way place.”

“Don’t be too sorry for that,” said John; “you don’t know what a revelation this out-of-the-way place may be to a tired worker like me, who lives always amid the unlovely sights and sounds of a city.”

“Ah! but that’s just it,” she said quickly.  “You see I’m not tired—­yet; and I’ve done no work.”

“That is why it’s such a rest to look at you,” said John, smiling.  “Flowers have their place in creation as vegetables have theirs.  But we only ask the flowers to bloom peacefully in sheltered gardens; we don’t insist on popping them into the soup with the onions and carrots.”

Lady Mary laughed as though she had not a care in the world.

“It is quite refreshing to find that a big-wig like you can talk just as much nonsense as a little-wig like me,” she said; “but you don’t know, for all that, what the silence and monotony of life here can be.  The very voice of a stranger falls like music on one’s ears.  I was so glad to see you, and you were so kind and sympathetic about—­my boy.  And then, all in a moment, my joy was turned into mourning, wasn’t it?  And Peter is going to the war, and it’s all like a dreadful dream; except that I know I shall wake up every morning only to realize more strongly that it’s true.”

John remembered that he was dallying with his mission, instead of fulfilling it.

“Sir Timothy cannot go to see his son off?  That must be a grief to him,” he said.

“No; he isn’t coming.  He has business, I believe,” said Lady Mary, a little coldly.  “There has been a dispute over some Crown lands, which march with ours.  Officials are often very dilatory and difficult to deal with.  Probably, however, you know more about it than I do.  I am going alone.  I have just been giving the necessary orders.  I shall take a servant with me, as well as my maid, for I am such an inexperienced traveller—­though it seems absurd, at my age—­that I am quite frightened of getting into the wrong trains.  I dread a journey by myself.  Even such a little journey as that.  But, of course, nothing would keep me at home.”