There was a tremendous burst of cheering, no longer distant, and the band played louder.

Lady Mary came hurrying across the terrace.  Weeping and agitated, and half blinded by her tears, she stumbled over the threshold of the window, and almost fell into John’s arms.  He drew her into the shadow of the curtain.

“John,” she cried; she saw no one else.  “Oh, I can’t bear it!  Oh, Peter, Peter, my boy, my poor boy!”

The doctor, with a swift and noiseless movement, turned the handle of the window next him, and let himself out on to the terrace.

When John looked up he was already gone.  Lady Mary did not hear the slight sound.

“Oh, John,” she said, “my boy’s come home—­but—­but—­”

“I know,” John said, very tenderly.

“I was afraid of breaking down before them all,” she whispered.  “Peter was afraid I should break down, and I felt my weakness, and came away.”

“To me,” said John.

His heart beat strongly.  He drew her more closely into his arms, deeply conscious that he held thus, for the first time, all he loved best in the world.

“To you,” said poor Lady Mary, very simply; as though aware only of the rest and support that refuge offered, and not of all of its strangeness.  “Alas! it has grown so natural to come to you now.”

“It will grow more natural every day,” said John.

She shook her head.  “There is Peter now,” she said faintly.  Then, looking into his face, she realized that John was not thinking of Peter.

For a moment’s space Lady Mary, too, forgot Peter.  She leant against the broad shoulder of the man who loved her; and felt as though all trouble, and disappointment, and doubt had slidden off her soul, and left her only the blissful certainty of happy rest.

Then she laid her hand very gently and entreatingly on his arm.

“I will not let you go,” said John.  “You came to me—­at last—­of your own accord, Mary.”

She coloured deeply and leant away from his arm, looking up at him in distress.

“I could not help it, John,” she said, very simply and naturally.  “But oh, I don’t know if I can—­if I ought—­to come to you any more.”

“What do you mean?” said John.

“I—­we—­have been thinking of Peter as a boy—­as the boy he was when he went away,” she said, in low, hurrying tones; “but he has come home a man, and, in some ways, altogether different.  He never used to want me; he used to think this place dull, and long to get away from it—­and from me, for that matter.  But now he’s—­he’s wounded, as you know; maimed, my poor boy, for life; and—­and he’s counting on me to make his home for him.  We never thought of that.  He says it wouldn’t be home without me; and he asked my pardon for being selfish in the past; my poor Peter!  I used to fear he had such a little, cold heart; but I was all wrong, for when he was so far away he thought of me, and was sorry he hadn’t loved me more.  He’s come home wanting to be everything to me, as I am to be everything to him.  And I should have been so glad, so thankful, only two years ago.  Oh, have I changed so much in two little years?”