Anne called to them.  “I say, darlings, would you mind awfully going somewhere else?  Colin can’t sleep with you prowling about there.”

Adeline’s voice came up to them with a little laughing quiver.

“All right, ducky; we’re going in.”

v

It was the end of October; John Severn had gone back to London.  He had taken a house in Montpelier Square and was furnishing it.

One morning Adeline came down smiling, more self-conscious than ever.

“Anne,” she said, “do you think you could look after Colin if I went up to Evelyn’s for a week or two?”

Evelyn was Adeline’s sister.  She lived in London.

“Of course I can.”

“You aren’t afraid of being alone with him?”

“Afraid?  Of Col-Col?  What do you take me for?”

“Well—­” Adeline meditated.  “It isn’t as if Mrs. Benning wasn’t here.”

Mrs. Benning was the housekeeper.

“That’ll make it all right and proper.  The fact is, I must have a rest and change before the winter.  I hardly ever get away, as you know.  And Evelyn would like to have me.  I think I must go.”

“Of course you must go,” Anne said.

And Adeline went.

At the end of the first week she wrote: 

    12 Eaton Square.  November 3d, 1915.

Darling Anne,—­Will you be very much surprised to hear that your father and I are going to be married?  You mayn’t know it, but he has loved me all his life.  We were to have married once (you knew that), and I jilted him.  But he has never changed.  He has been so faithful and forgiving, and has waited for me so patiently—­twenty-seven years, Anne—­that I hadn’t the heart to refuse him.  I feel that I must make up to him for all the pain I’ve given him.

We want you to come up for the wedding on the 10th.  It will be very quiet.  No bridesmaids.  No party.  We think it best not to have it at Wyck, on Colin’s account.  So I shall just be married from Evelyn’s house.

    Give us your blessing, there’s a dear.

    Your loving

    Adeline Fielding.

Anne’s eyes filled with tears.  At last she saw Adeline Fielding completely, as she was, without any fascination.  She thought:  “She’s marrying to get away from Colin.  She’s left him to me to look after.  How could she leave him?  How could she?”

Anne didn’t go up for the wedding.  She told Adeline it wasn’t much use asking her when she knew that Colin couldn’t be left.

“Or, if you like, that I can’t leave him.”

Her father wrote back: 

Your Aunt Adeline thinks you reproach her for leaving Colin.  I told her you were too intelligent to do anything of the sort.  You’ll agree it’s the best thing she could do for him.  She’s no more capable of looking after Colin than a kitten.  She wants to be looked after herself, and you ought to be grateful to me for relieving you of the job.

    But I don’t like your being alone down there with Colin.  If he isn’t
    better we must send him to a nursing home.