But, albeit he was braced for endurance, the long hours of waiting were very hard to bear.  His sole comfort lay in the fact that Avery was making gradual progress in the right direction.  It was a slow and difficult recovery, as Maxwell Wyndham had foretold, but it was continuous.  Tudor assured him of this every day with a curt kindliness that had grown on him of late.  It was his own fashion of showing a wholly involuntary sympathy of which he was secretly half-ashamed, and which he well knew Piers would have brooked in no other form.  It established an odd sort of truce between them of which each was aware the while he sternly ignored it.  They could never be friends.  It was fundamentally impossible, but at least they had, if only temporarily, ceased to be enemies.

Little Mrs. Lorimer’s sympathy was also of a half-ashamed type.  She did not want to be sorry for Piers, but she could not wholly restrain her pity.  The look in his eyes haunted her.  Curiously it made her think of some splendid animal created for liberty, and fretting its heart out in utter, hopeless misery on a chain.

She longed with all her motherly heart to comfort him, and by the irony of circumstance it fell to her to deal the final blow to what was left of his hope.  She wondered afterwards how she ever brought herself to the task, but it was in reality so forced upon her that she could not evade it.  Avery, lying awake during the first hours of a still night, heard her husband’s feet pacing up and down the terrace, and the mischief was done.  She was thrown into painful agitation and wholly lost her sleep in consequence.  When Mrs. Lorimer arrived about noon on the following day, she found her alarmingly weak, and the nurse in evident perplexity.

“I am sure there is something worrying her,” the latter said to Mrs. Lorimer.  “I can’t think what it is.”

But directly Mrs. Lorimer was alone with Avery, the trouble came out.  For she reached out fevered hands to her, saying, “Why, oh, why did you persuade me to come back here?  I knew he would come if I did!”

Again the emergency impelled Mrs. Lorimer to a display of common-sense with which few would have credited her.

“Oh, do you mean Piers, dear?” she said.  “But surely you are not afraid of him!  He has been here all the time—­ever since you were so ill.”

“And I begged you not to send!” groaned Avery.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Lorimer very gently, “it was his right to be here.”

“Then that night—­that night—­” gasped Avery, “he really did come to me—­that night after the baby was born.”

“My darling, you begged for him so piteously,” said Mrs. Lorimer apologetically.

Avery’s lip quivered.  “That was just what I feared—­what I wanted to make impossible,” she said.  “When one is suffering, one forgets so.”

“But surely it was the cry of your heart, darling,” urged Mrs. Lorimer tremulously.  “And do you know—­poor lad—­he looks so ill, so miserable.”