“I haven’t”—­half whispering—­“told them anything about the Hermes!”

“It was no theft!” said Felicia passionately.  “I would tell anybody!”

Netta was silent, her face working with unspoken fear.  Suddenly, Felicia said in her foreign English, pronounced with a slight effort, and very precisely: 

“That is a very beautiful young man!”

Netta was startled.

“Lord Tatham?  Not at all, Felicia.  He is very nice, but I do not even call him good-looking.”

“He is a very beautiful young man,” repeated Felicia with emphasis, “and I am going to marry him!”

“Felicia! for heaven’s sake—­do not show your mad ways here!” cried Netta, white with new alarm.

For the first time for many, many days Felicia smiled.  She got up and went to a glass that hung on the wall.  Taking one of the sidecombs from her curls, she began to pull them out, winding them round her tiny fingers, making more of them, and patting them back into place, till her head was one silky mass of ripples.  Then she looked at herself.

“I must have a new dress at once!” she said peremptorily.

“I don’t know where you’ll get it!” cried Netta—­“you foolish child!”

“The young man will give it me.”  And still before the glass, she gave a little bound, like a kitten.  Then she ran back to her mother, took Netta’s face in her hands, dashed a kiss at it, and subsided, weak and gasping, on to a sofa.  When Victoria reappeared Felicia was motionless as before, but there was a first streak of colour in her thin, cheeks, and a queer brightness in her eyes.

Faversham was sitting in his Pengarth office, turning over the morning’s post.  He had just ridden in from the Tower.  Before him lay a telephone message taken down for him by his clerk, before his arrival: 

“Lord Tatham will be at Mr. Faversham’s office by 12:30.  He wishes to speak to Mr. Faversham on important business.”

Something, no doubt, to do with the right-of-way proceedings to which Tatham was a party; or, possibly, with a County Council notice which had roused Melrose to fury, to the effect that some Threlfall land would be taken compulsorily for allotments under a recent Act, if the land were not provided by arrangement.

“Perfectly reasonable!  And every complaint that Tatham will make—­if he has come to complain—­will be perfectly reasonable.  And I shall have to tell him to go to the devil!”

He sat pen in hand, staring at the paper on his desk, his mind divided between a bitter disgust with his day’s work and the consciousness of a deep central resolve, which that disgust did not affect, and would not be allowed to affect.  He was looking harassed, pale, and perceptibly older.  No doubt his general health had not yet fully recovered from his accident.  But those who disliked in him a certain natural haughtiness, said that he had now more “side on” than ever.