Now, as she recalled the expression of his eyes, during their clash at the dinner-table, she realized, with an excitement which was not disagreeable, that something much more prolonged and serious might lie before her.  Accomplished modern, as she knew him to be in most things, he was going to be “stuffy” and “stupid” in some.  Lord Donald’s proceedings in the matter of Lady Preston evidently seemed to him—­she had been made to feel it—­frankly abominable.  And he was not going to ask the man capable of them within his own doors.  Well and good.  “But as I don’t agree with him—­Donald was only larking!—­I shall take my own way.  A telegram goes anyway to Donald to-morrow morning—­and we shall see.  So good-night, Cousin Philip!” And blowing a kiss towards the empty hall, she gathered her white skirts round her, and fled laughing towards her own room.

But just as she neared it, a door in front of her, leading to a staircase, opened, and a man in khaki appeared, carrying a candle.  It was Captain Lodge, her neighbour at the dinner-table.  The young man stared with amazement at the apparition rushing along the gallery towards him,—­the girl’s floating hair, and flushed loveliness as his candle revealed it.  Helena evidently enjoyed his astonishment, and his sudden look of admiration.  But before he could speak, she had vanished within her own door, just holding it open long enough to give him a laughing nod before it shut, and darkness closed with it on the gallery.

“A man would need to keep his head with that girl!” thought Captain Lodge, with tantalized amusement.  “But, my hat, what a beauty!”

Meanwhile in the library downstairs a good deal of thinking was going on.  Lord Buntingford was taking more serious stock of his new duties than he had done yet.  As he walked, smoking, up and down, his thoughts were full of his poor little cousin Rachel Pitstone.  She had always been a favourite of his; and she had always known him better than any other person among his kinsfolk.  He had found it easy to tell her secrets, when nobody else could have dragged a word from him; and as a matter of fact she had known before she died practically all that there was to know about him.  And she had been so kind, and simple and wise.  Had she perhaps once had a tendresse for him—­before she met Ned Pitstone?—­and if things had gone—­differently—­might he not, perhaps, have married her?  Quite possibly.  In any case the bond between them had always been one of peculiar intimacy; and in looking back on it he had nothing to reproach himself with.  He had done what he could to ease her suffering life.  Struck down in her prime by a mortal disease, a widow at thirty, with her one beautiful child, her chief misfortune had been the melancholy and sensitive temperament, which filled the rooms in which she lived as full of phantoms as the palace of Odysseus in the vision of Theoclymenus.