‘Sir William is there, with Captain Marsworth,’ said Nelly.  ’Cicely comes here to-morrow.’

‘Does she expect me to give her my room?’ said Bridget sharply.

‘Not at all.  She likes the little spare-room.’

‘Or pretends to!  Has Sir William been here to-day?’

‘Yes, he came round.’

A few more questions and answers led to silence broken only by the crackling of the fire.  The firelight played on Nelly’s cheek and throat, and on her white languid hands.  Presently it caught her wedding-ring, and Bridget’s eye was drawn to the sparkle of the gold.  She sat looking absently at her sister.  She was thinking of a tiny room in a hut hospital—­of the bed—­and of those eyes that had opened on her.  And there sat Nelly—­knowing nothing!

It was all a horrible anxiety.  But it couldn’t last long.

CHAPTER XIV

‘So you are not at church?’

The voice was Marsworth’s as he stepped inside the flagged passage of the farm, Nelly having just opened the door to him.

‘It’s so far!—­in winter,’ said Nelly a little guiltily.  ’I go to Grasmere in summer.’

’Oh! don’t apologise—­to a heathen like me!  I’m only too thankful to find you alone.  Is your sister here?’

’Yes.  But we’ve made a room for her in one of the outhouses.  She works there.’

‘What at?  Is she still learning Spanish?’ asked Marsworth, smiling, as he followed Nelly into the little white drawing-room.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nelly, after a moment, in a tone of depression.  ‘Bridget doesn’t tell me.’

The corners of Marsworth’s strong mouth shewed amusement.  He was not well acquainted with Bridget Cookson, but as far as his observation went, she seemed to him a curious specimen of the half-educated pretentious woman so plentiful in our modern life.  In place of ‘psychology’ and ‘old Spanish,’ the subjects in which Miss Cookson was said to be engaged, he would have liked to prescribe for her—­and all her kin—­courses of an elementary kind in English history and vulgar fractions.

But, for Nelly Sarratt, Marsworth felt the tender and chivalrous respect that natures like hers exact easily from strong men.  To him, as to Farrell, she was the ‘little saint’ and peacemaker, with her lovingness, her sympathy, her lack of all the normal vanities and alloys that beset the pretty woman.  That she was not a strong character, that she was easily influenced and guided by those who touched her affections, he saw.  But that kind of weakness in a woman—­when that woman also possesses the mysterious something, half physical, half spiritual, which gives delight—­is never unpleasing to such men as Marsworth, nor indeed to other women.  It was Marsworth’s odd misfortune that he should have happened to fall in love with a young woman who had practically none of the qualities that he naturally and spontaneously admired in the sex.