It came about thus.  At her request Marshall Wace walked up to the station early that morning, to secure the English papers on their arrival by the mail train from Paris.  After a quite unnecessarily long interval, in Henrietta’s opinion, he returned with an irritable expression and flustered manner.  Such, at least, was the impression she received on his joining her in the wide airy corridor outside the General’s sick-chamber.

“I thought you were never coming back,” she greeted him.  “What has detained you?”

“The Paris train was late,” he returned.  “And—­wait an instant, Cousin Henrietta.  I want to speak to you.  Yes, I am hot and tired, and I am put out—­I don’t deny it.”

“Why?” Henrietta asked him indifferently.

Her own temper was not at its brightest and best.  The office of ministering angel had begun most woefully to pall on her.  What if this illness betokened a break up of health on the part of General Frayling?  Bath chairs, hot bottles, air-cushions, pap-like meals and such kindred unlovelinesses loomed large ahead!  That was the worst of marrying an old, or anyhow an oldish, man.  You never could tell how soon the natural order of things might be reversed, and you obliged to wait hand and foot on him, instead of his waiting hand and foot on you.  Henrietta felt fretful.  Her looking-glass presented a depressing reflection of fine lines and sharpened features.  If she should wilt under this prolonged obligation of nursing, her years openly advertise their number, and she grow faded, passee, a woman who visibly has outlived her prime?  She could have shaken the insufficiently dying General in his bed!  Yes, insufficiently dying—­for, in heaven’s name, let him make up his mind and that speedily—­get well and make himself useful, or veritably and finally depart before, for the preservation of her good looks, it was too late.

“I met Sir Charles Verity at the station,” Wace went on.  “He was coming out of the first class salle d’attente.  He stopped and spoke to me, enquired for cousin Fred; but his manner was peculiar, autocratic to a degree.  He made me feel in the way, feel that he was annoyed at my being there and wanted to get rid of me.”

“Imagination, my dear Marshall.  In all probability he wasn’t thinking about you one way or the other, but merely about his own affairs, his own—­as Carteret reports—­remarkably clever book.—­But why, I wonder, was he at the station so early?”

Henrietta stood turning the folded newspaper about and idly scanning the head-lines, while the wind, entering by the open casements at the end of the corridor, lifted and fluttered the light blue gauze scarf she wore round her shoulders over her white frilled morning gown.

“He didn’t tell me,” the large, soft, very hot young man said.  “You may call it imagination, Cousin Henrietta; but I can’t.  I am positive his manner was intentional.  He meant to snub me, by intimating of how slight account I am in his estimation.  It was exceedingly galling.  I do not want to employ a vulgar expression—­but he looked down his nose at me as if I was beneath contempt.  You know that insolent, arrogant way of his?”