As the weeks wore on her features had been restored to their proud, calm beauty, her articulation was almost as clear as of old:  yet, now and then, there would be a sudden faltering, the tongue and lips would refuse their office, or she would forget a word, or use a wrong word unconsciously.  But there was no recovery of power or movement on that side of the body which had been stricken.  The paralysed limbs were still motionless, lifeless as marble; and it was clear that Mr. Horton had begun to lose heart about his patient.  There was nothing obscure in the case, but the patient’s importance made the treatment a serious matter, and the surgeon begged to be allowed to summon Sir William Jenner.

This, however, Lady Maulevrier refused.

‘I don’t want any fuss made about me,’ she said.  ’I am content to trust myself to your skill, and I beg that no other doctor may be summoned.’

Mr. Horton understood his patient’s feelings on this point.  She had a sense of humiliation in her helplessness, and, like some wounded animal that crawls to its covert to die, she would fain have hidden her misery from the eye of strangers.  She had allowed no one, not even Maulevrier, to be informed of the nature of her illness.

’It will be time enough for him to know all about me when he comes here,’ she said.  ‘I shall be obliged to see him whenever he does come.’

Maulevrier had spent Christmas and New Year in Paris, Mr. Hammond still his companion.  Her ladyship commented upon this with a touch of scorn.

’Mr. Hammond is like the Umbra you were reading about the other day in Lord Lytton’s “Last Days of Pompeii,"’ she said to Mary.  ’It must be very nice for him to go about the world with a friend who franks him everywhere.’

‘But we don’t know that Maulevrier franks him,’ protested Mary, blushing.  ’We have no right to suppose that Mr. Hammond does not pay his own expenses.’

’My dear child, is it possible for a young man who has no private means to go gadding about the world on equal terms with a spendthrift like Maulevrier—­to pay for Moors in Scotland and apartments at the Bristol?’

‘But they are not staying at the Bristol,’ exclaimed Mary.

’They are staying at an old-established French hotel on the left side of the Seine.  They are going about amongst the students and the workmen, dining at popular restaurants, hearing people talk.  Maulevrier says it is delightfully amusing—­ever so much better than the beaten track of life in Anglo-American Paris.’

’I daresay they are leading a Bohemian life, and will get into trouble before they have done,’ said her ladyship, gloomily.

‘Maulevrier is as wild as a hawk.’

‘He is the dearest boy in the world,’ exclaimed Mary.

She was deeply grateful for her brother’s condescension in writing her a letter of two pages long, letting her into the secrets of his life.  She felt as if Mr. Hammond were ever so much nearer to her now she knew where he was, and how he was amusing himself.