He paid Maud a brief visit before departing, and found her better.  She was half dressed and lying on a couch in her room.  He extracted a promise from her that she would not go down before tea, though she demurred somewhat on the score of the expected visitor.

“Leave her to Bunny!” said Jake.  “He’s quite capable of looking after her for an hour or two.”

“I think Bunny meant to go to the races,” she said.

Jake frowned.  “Well, he can’t for once.  Don’t you fret now!  She’ll be all right.”

“Well, tell them to bring her straight up to see me when she arrives!” Maud begged him.  “I shan’t be asleep, and really I am much better.”

“All right,” he conceded.  “I’ll do that.”

He went out and there fell the deep shining peace of a spring afternoon.  Somewhere in the distance a cuckoo was calling softly, monotonously, seductively.  A thrush was warbling in the terraced garden, and from her window Maud could see old Chops the setter curled up in a warm corner asleep.  The children were all out on the downs, and the house was very quiet.

Her thoughts turned dreamily to Saltash.  What a pity he did not find some nice girl to marry!  Her faith in him, often shaken and as often renewed, had somehow taken deeper root since their talk of the night before.  Charlie was beginning to tire of his riotous living.  He was beginning to want the better things.  But in his present mood she saw a danger.  He had come to a critical point in his career, and he would either go up or down.  There would be no middle course with him.  Knowing him as she did, she realized that a very little pressure would incline him either way.  She felt as if his very life hung in the balance.  It depended so vitally—­upon whence the pressure came.

“If only some decent woman would fall in love with him!” she sighed, and then found herself smiling wistfully at the thought that Saltash’s heart would not be an easy thing to capture.  He was far too accustomed to adulation, wherever he went.  “Besides, he’s such a flirt,” she reflected.  “One never knows whether he is in earnest till the mischief is done.”

The cuckoo’s soft persistence began somehow to seem like a penance.  “When he has said it just like that four hundred and fifty times he’ll be absolved and allowed to change his tune,” was her thought.  “I wonder if poor Charles Rex has said the same thing as often as that, and if that is why he is tired.”

A mist began to rise in her brain, making vague the cuckoo’s call, blurring even the clear sweet notes of the thrush.  A delicious drowsiness crept over her.  She gave herself to it with conscious delight.  It was so exquisite to feel the grim band that had bound her brow with such cruel tightness relax at last and fall away.  Very blissfully she drifted into slumber.

It was nearly two hours later that she became somewhat suddenly aware of feet sauntering under her window and young voices talking together.