Once only had she been to Baronmead since the masquerade on the ice.  It was in fulfilment of her promise to Nap, but she had not seen him; and as the weeks slipped by she began to wonder at his prolonged silence.  For no word of any sort reached her from him.  He seemed to have forgotten her very existence.  That he was well again she knew from Lucas, who often came over in the motor with his mother.

As his brother had predicted he had made a rapid recovery; but no sooner was he well than he was gone with a suddenness that surprised no one but Anne.  She concluded that his family knew where he was to be found, but no news of his whereabouts reached her.  Nap was the one subject upon which neither Mrs. Errol nor her elder son ever expanded, and for some nameless reason Anne shrank from asking any questions regarding him.  She was convinced that he would return sooner or later.  She was convinced that, whatever appearances might be, he had not relinquished the bond of friendship that linked them.  She did not understand him.  She believed him to be headlong and fiercely passionate, but beneath all there seemed to her to be a certain stability, a tenacity of purpose, that no circumstance, however tragic, could thwart.  She knew, deep in the heart of her she knew, that he would come back.

She would not spend much thought upon him in those days.  Something stood ever in the path of thought.  Invariably she encountered it, and as invariably she turned aside, counting her new peace as too precious to hazard.

Meanwhile she went her quiet way, sometimes aided by Lucas, but more often settling her affairs alone, neither attempting nor desiring to look into the future.

The news of Sir Giles’s illness spread rapidly through the neighbourhood, and people began to be very kind to her.  She knew no one intimately.  Her husband’s churlishness had deprived her of almost all social intercourse, but never before had she realised how completely he was held responsible for her aloofness.

Privately, she would have preferred to maintain her seclusion, but it was not in her to be ungracious.  She felt bound to accept the ready sympathy extended to her.  It touched her, even though, had the choice been hers, she would have done without it.  Lucas also urged her in his kindly fashion not to lead a hermit’s existence.  Mrs. Errol was insistent upon the point.

“Don’t you do it, dear,” was her exhortation.  “There may not be much good to be got out of society, I’ll admit.  But it’s one better than solitude.  Don’t you shut yourself up and fret.  I reckon the Lord didn’t herd us together for nothing, and it’s His scheme of creation anyway.”

And so Anne tried to be cordial; with the result that on a certain morning in early May there reached her a short friendly note from Mrs. Damer, wife of the M.F.H., begging her to dine with them quite informally on the following night.

“There will only be a few of us, all intimate friends,” the note said.  “Do come.  I have been longing to ask you for such an age.”