Span was lying on the ground before them, inert, almost as if dead.  But his eyes, his troubled, frightened eyes, were very much alive.

Varick went off into the house for a moment.  He had never liked dogs; and this ugly brute’s behaviour, so he told himself, annoyed him very much.

Span got up and shook himself, almost as if he had been asleep.

Panton bent down.  “Span,” he said warningly, “be a good dog and behave yourself!  Remember what happened to you after the poor lunatic lady went away.”

And Span looked up with that peculiar, thoughtful look which dogs sometimes have of understanding everything which is being said to them.

Span had been beaten—­a very rare experience for him—­after the mad lady had left the doctor’s house.  But whether he understood or not the exact reference to that odious episode in his happy past life, there was no doubt that Span did understand that his master regarded him as being in disgrace; and it was a very subdued dog that walked sedately into the hall where most of the party were gathered together ready to greet the new-comer.

Miss Farrow was particularly cordial, and so was Helen Brabazon.  She and Dr. Panton had become real friends during Mrs. Varick’s illness, and they had been at one in their affection for, and admiration of, Lionel Varick during that piteous time.  To the doctor (though he would not have admitted it, even to himself, for the world) there had been something very repugnant about the dying woman.  Though still young in years, she might have been any age; and she was so fretful and so selfish, hardly allowing her husband out of her sight, while utterly devoted to him, of course, in her queer, egoistic way—­and to Miss Brabazon, her kind new friend.  The doctor had soon realized that it was the pity which is akin to love which had made Helen become so attached to poor Milly Varick—­intense pity for the unhappy soul who was going to lose her new-found happiness.  Milly’s pathetic cry:  “I never had a girl friend before.  You can’t think how happy it makes me!” had touched Helen to the heart.

Standing there, in that noble old room hung with some beautiful tapestries forming a perfect background to the life and colour which was now filling it, Panton was surprised to find how vividly those memories of last autumn came surging back to him.  It must be owing to this meeting with Miss Brabazon—­this reunion with the two people with whom he had gone through an experience which, though it so often befalls a kind and sympathetic doctor, yet never loses its poignancy—­that he was thinking now so intensely of poor Mrs. Varick.

It was Helen Brabazon who had introduced the new-comer to Miss Farrow, for Varick had disappeared, and soon Dr. Panton was looking round him with interest and curiosity.  Most of the people whom he knew to be staying at Wyndfell Hall were present, but not the girl his friend had described—­not the girl, that is, whose portrait he had seen in the Sketch.  Just as he was telling himself this, a door opened, and two people came through together—­a tall, fair, smiling young man, and a quaint, slender figure, looking like a child rather than like a woman, whose pale, yet vivid little face was framed in thick, dark brown, bobbed hair, and whose large, bright eyes gleamed mischievously.