“Geoffrey pleads for the first week in September, that they may have time to get to some favourite places of his in France before Parliament meets.  Helena and Mrs. Friend will be here to-morrow.”

After a pause he turned to her, with another note in his voice: 

“You have been with Arthur?”

She gave an account of her day.

“He misses you so.  I wanted to make up to him a little.”

“He loves you—­so do I!” said Buntingford.  “Won’t you come and take charge of us both, dear Cynthia?  I owe you so much already—­I would do my best to pay it.”

He took her hand and pressed it.  All was said.

Yet through all her gladness, Cynthia felt the truth of Georgina’s remark—­“When he marries it will be for peace—­not passion.”  Well, she must accept it.  The first-fruits were not for her.  With all his chivalry he would never be able to give her what she had it in her to give him.  It was the touch of acid in the sweetness of her lot.  But sweet it was all the same.

When she told Georgina, her sister broke into a little laugh—­admiring, not at all unkind.

“Cynthia, you are a clever woman!  But I must point out that Providence has given you every chance.”

Peace indeed was the note of Philip’s mood that night, as he paced up and down beside the lake after his solitary dinner.  He was, momentarily at least, at rest, and full of patient hope.  His youth was over.  He resigned it, with a smile and a sigh; while seeming still to catch the echoes of it far away, like music in some invisible city that a traveller leaves behind him in the night.  His course lay clear before him.  Politics would give him occupation, and through political life power might come to him.  But the real task to which he set his most human heart, in this moment of change and reconstruction, was to make a woman and a child happy.