Mrs. Gaddesden raised a triumphant though tear-stained countenance.  She was avenging not only her father’s latest slight, but a long series of grievances—­small and great—­connected with Elizabeth’s position in the house.  And the Squire’s farewell to her had turned even her grief to gall.

‘If Pamela was hurt, I was a most innocent cause!’ said Elizabeth at last, indignantly.  ’And if you or any one else had given me the smallest hint—­’

‘How could we?’ was the rather sulky reply.  ’Pamela, of course, never said a word—­to me.  But I rather think she did say something to Desmond.’

‘Desmond!’ cried Elizabeth under her breath.  She turned slowly, and went away, leaving Mrs. Gaddesden panting and a little scared at what she had done.

Elizabeth went back to the library, where there was much to put in order.  She forced herself to tidy the Squire’s table, and to write a business letter or two.  But when that was done she dropped her face in her hands, and shed a few very bitter tears.

She seemed to herself to have failed miserably.  In truth, her heart clung to all these people.  She soon attached herself to those with whom she lived, and was but little critical of them.  The warm, maternal temper which went with her shrewd brain seemed to need perpetually objects on which to spend itself.  She could have loved the twins dearly had they let her, and day by day, in the absence of the mother, she had been accustomed to nurse, she had even positively enjoyed ‘petting’ Mrs. Gaddesden, holding her wool for her, seeing to her hot-water bottles, and her breakfast in bed.

Pamela in love with Arthur Chicksands!  And she remembered that a faint idea of it had once crossed her mind, only to be entirely dismissed and forgotten.

’But I ought to have seen—­I ought to have known!  Am I really a vampire?’

And she remembered how she, in her first youth, had suffered from the dominance and the accomplishment of older women; women who gave a girl no chance, who must have all the admiration, and all the opportunities, who would coolly and cruelly snatch a girl’s lover from her.

‘And that’s how I’ve appeared to Pamela!’ thought Elizabeth between laughing and crying.  ’Yet all I did was to talk about ash for aeroplanes!  Oh, you poor child—­you poor child!’

She seemed to feel Pamela’s pain in her own heart—­she who had had love and lost it.

‘Am I just an odious, clever woman?’ She sat down and hated herself.  All the passing vanity that had been stirred in her by Sir Henry’s compliments, all the natural pleasure she had taken in the success of her great adventure as a business woman, in the ease with which she, the Squire’s paid secretary, had lately begun to lead the patriotic effort of an English county—­how petty, how despicable even, it seemed, in presence of a boy who had given his all!—­even beside a girl in love!

And the Squire—­’Was I hard to him too?’