“Well, my dear, I shall not be in your way to-morrow morning; I promise you that.”

The speaker’s satisfaction was plain; yet nothing could have been less maternal.  The girl’s heart, when she found herself alone, was very sore, and the depression of a past which had been so much of a failure, so lacking in any satisfied emotion and the sweet preludes of family affection, darkened for a while even the present and the future.

After a time she got up, and leaving her room, went to sit in a passage outside it.  It was the piece of wide upper corridor leading to the winding stairs she had descended on the night of the ball.  It was one of the loneliest and oddest places in the house, for it communicated only with her room and the little staircase, which was hardly ever used.  It was, indeed, a small room in itself, and was furnished with a few huge old chairs with moth-eaten frames and tattered seats.  A flowery paper of last-century date sprawled over the walls, the carpet had many holes in it, and the shallow, traceried windows, set almost flush in the outer surface of the wall, were curtainless now, as they had been two years before.

She drew one of the old chairs to a window, and softly opened it.  There was a young moon, and many stars, seen uncertainly through the rush of April cloud.  Every now and then a splash of rain moved the creepers and swept across the lawn, to be followed by a spell of growing and breathing silence.  The scent of hyacinths and tulips mounted through the wet air.  She could see a long ghostly line of primroses, from which rose the grey base of the Tudor front, checkered with a dim light and shade.  Beyond the garden, with its vague forms of fountain and sun-dial, the cedars stood watching; the little church slept to her left.

So, face to face with Nature, the old house, and the night, she took passionate counsel with herself.  After to-night surely, she would be no more lonely!  She was going for ever from her own keeping to that of another.  For she never, from the moment she wrote her letter, had the smallest doubt as to what his answer to her would be; never the smallest dread that he would, even in the lightest passing impression, connect what she was going to do with any thought of blame or wonder.  Her pride and fear were gone out of her; only, she dared not think of how he would look and speak when the moment came, because it made her sick and faint with feeling.

How strange to imagine what, no doubt, would be said and thought about her return to him by the outside world!  His great place in society, his wealth, would be the obvious solution of it for many—­too obvious even to be debated.  Looking back upon her thoughts of this night in after years, she could not remember that the practical certainty of such an interpretation had even given her a moment’s pain.  It was too remote from all her now familiar ways of thinking—­and his.  In her early Mellor days the enormous importance that her feverish