“It is a dreadful accident,” said Lady Arthur, “and I am sorry for the duke and duchess.”  She said this in a calm way.  It had always been her opinion that Lord Arthur’s relations had never seen the magnitude of her loss, and this feeling lowered the temperature of her sympathy, as a wind blowing over ice cools the atmosphere.  “I think George’s grief very genuine,” she continued:  “at the same time he can’t but see that there is only that delicate lad’s life, that has been hanging so long by a hair, between him and the title.”

“Lady Arthur!” exclaimed Alice in warm tones.

“I know, my dear, you are thinking me very unfeeling, but I am not:  I am only a good deal older than you.  George’s position to-day is very different from what it was a year ago.  If he were to write to you again, I would advise another kind of answer.”

“He’ll never write again,” said Alice in a tone which struck the ear of Lady Arthur, so that when the young girl left the room she turned to Miss Adamson and said, “Do you think she really cares about him?”

“She has not made me her confidante,” that lady answered, “but my own opinion is that she does care a good deal for Mr. Eildon.”

“Do you really think so?” exclaimed Lady Arthur.  “She said she did not at the time, and I thought then, and think still, that it would not signify much to George whom he married; and you know he would be so much the better for money.  But if he is to be his uncle’s successor, that alters the case entirely.  I’ll go to Eildon myself, and bring him back with me.”

Lady Arthur went to Eildon and mingled her tears with those of the stricken parents, whose grief might have moved a very much harder heart than hers.  But they did not see the state of their only remaining son as Lady Arthur and others saw it; for, while it was commonly thought that he would hardly reach maturity, they were sanguine enough to believe that he was outgrowing the delicacy of his childhood.

Lady Arthur asked George to return with her to Garscube Hall, but he said he could not possibly do so.  Then she said she had told Miss Adamson and Alice that she would bring him with her, and they would be disappointed.

“Tell them,” he said, “that I have very little time to spare, and I must spend it with Frank, when I am sure they will excuse me.”

They excused him, but they were not the less disappointed, all the three ladies; indeed, they were so much disappointed that they did not speak of the thing to each other, as people chatter over and thereby evaporate a trifling defeat of hopes.

Mr. Eildon left his cousin only to visit his mother and sisters for a day, and then returned to London; from which it appeared that he was not excessively anxious to visit Garscube Hall.

But everything there went on as usual.  The ladies painted, they went excursions, they wrote ballads; still, there was a sense of something being amiss—­the heart of their lives seemed dull in its beat.