The little group under the portico broke up.  Magdalen slipped away into the garden to hear Frank’s account of the interview with his father.  The other three ladies entered the house together.  When Mrs. Vanstone was comfortably established on the sofa, Norah and Miss Garth left her to repose, and withdrew to the library to look over the last parcel of books from London.

It was a quiet, cloudless summer’s day.  The heat was tempered by a light western breeze; the voices of laborers at work in a field near reached the house cheerfully; the clock-bell of the village church as it struck the quarters floated down the wind with a clearer ring, a louder melody than usual.  Sweet odors from field and flower-garden, stealing in at the open windows, filled the house with their fragrance; and the birds in Norah’s aviary upstairs sang the song of their happiness exultingly in the sun.

As the church clock struck the quarter past four, the morning-room door opened; and Mrs. Vanstone crossed the hall alone.  She had tried vainly to compose herself.  She was too restless to lie still and sleep.  For a moment she directed her steps toward the portico—­then turned, and looked about her, doubtful where to go, or what to do next.  While she was still hesitating, the half-open door of her husband’s study attracted her attention.  The room seemed to be in sad confusion.  Drawers were left open; coats and hats, account-books and papers, pipes and fishing-rods were all scattered about together.  She went in, and pushed the door to—­but so gently that she still left it ajar.  “It will amuse me to put his room to rights,” she thought to herself.  “I should like to do something for him before I am down on my bed, helpless.”  She began to arrange his drawers, and found his banker’s book lying open in one of them.  “My poor dear, how careless he is!  The servants might have seen all his affairs, if I had not happened to have looked in.”  She set the drawers right; and then turned to the multifarious litter on a side-table.  A little old-fashioned music-book appeared among the scattered papers, with her name written in it, in faded ink.  She blushed like a young girl in the first happiness of the discovery.  “How good he is to me!  He remembers my poor old music-book, and keeps it for my sake.”  As she sat down by the table and opened the book, the bygone time came back to her in all its tenderness.  The clock struck the half-hour, struck the three-quarters—­and still she sat there, with the music-book on her lap, dreaming happily over the old songs; thinking gratefully of the golden days when his hand had turned the pages for her, when his voice had whispered the words which no woman’s memory ever forgets.

Norah roused herself from the volume she was reading, and glanced at the clock on the library mantel-piece.

“If papa comes back by the railway,” she said, “he will be here in ten minutes.”

Miss Garth started, and looked up drowsily from the book which was just dropping out of her hand.