A scheme had come into my head in these months alone.

My mother-in-law was still an imbecile, happy and contented.  She was surrounded with nurses and all the attention that money and affection could buy.  Why should not poor Amelia get some pleasure out of life?

I had a feeling that I, too, meant to live when the period of my mourning should be over; and how glorious to live and to forget that I had ever even had the name of Gurrage!  I would give the whole of Augustus’s fortune to Amelia; then she would gain by it, and I, too, would have the satisfaction of feeling that my marriage was an episode, a year to be blotted out of my life.

This thought would never have come if Mrs. Gurrage had not passed into another sphere of mental living.  I would not have wounded her for the world.

I settled all the details in my mind, on my voyage home, and no sooner got to London than I executed them.  The law is a slow and delaying business, and even a deed of gift requires endless formalities to go through.

Amelia was overcome.  Her gratitude was speechless some days, and at others broke into torrents of words.

“I can have aunt to live with me back in the dear old home,” she said, once.

To Amelia the crimson-satin boudoir, and the negro figures, and the bears, and the stained-glass window are all household gods, and far be it from me to wish to disillusionize her.

And I?  I can take my household gods to a more congenial setting, perhaps.  Who can tell?  With the summer coming on and the birds singing it would be useless for me to pretend to grieve any more.  A joy lives always in my heart.  Some day—­not too soon, but some day—­I shall see Antony.

I shall never hurry matters.  If he cares for me as deeply as I once thought, he will write to me soon or make some sign.  Meanwhile—­oh, I am free!  Free and rich and young again!  The shadows are fading away.

Grandmamma was right.

“Remember, above all things, that life is full of compensations.”

Dear grandmamma!  I wish you could come back to enjoy this second youth with me.

Shall I travel?  It is late June now.  Shall I go and see the world, or shall I wait, and perhaps, later on, have a companion to see it with me?

To avoid the Coronation festivities, when all details about my transfer of Augustus’s property to Amelia were finished, I went over to France.  I should stop at Versailles for a month and see the Marquis in Paris, and then, perhaps, go back to the cottage.

I had often heard from Lady Tilchester—­charming, sympathetic, feminine letters.  I must come to them at Harley whenever I decided to go out a little, she said.  I felt the whole of the world was opening fairly for me.

I stopped a day or two in Paris to do a little shopping on my way to Versailles, and coming down the steps at Ritz one day I met Mr. Budge.  He had come over for a breath of gayer air, he told me, after the Coronation fiasco.