They were still struggling in prison when he went on board the Monarchic, but there a light shone fitfully through the keyhole of the cell.  It was a beautiful light, almost beautiful enough to be a light Peter had read and dreamed of which was said never to shine on land or sea.  Then, suddenly and surprisingly, it went out.  The prison, full of thoughts, was left a place of dark confusion.

This was the inner state of Peter Rolls, Jr., when he arrived at home after his long absence.  But outwardly he appeared to be much as usual, and was so nice to the Irish guests that Ena was grateful, though never remorseful.  Indeed, she had so much to think about that she almost forgot her little act of diplomacy in eliminating an undesirable sister-in-law.

She was on tenterhooks lest Lord Raygan and his mother and sister should be finding the menage at Sea Gull Manor “all wrong,” and laughing secretly at father and mother.  If there had been that fear about the dressmaker’s model on top of the rest of her anxieties she would have broken down with nervous prostration.  But, thanks to her for saving him (without his knowledge), Peter seemed to have got over his silliness and was able to stand by her like a brick.

Lady Raygan, a singularly young-looking, red-faced woman of boyish figure, and with stick-out teeth, was a leading militant suffragette.  When she embarked hastily for Queenstown she had just been rescued by her son from the London police.  At first she had been too seasick to care that she was being carried past her home and that a series of lectures she had intended giving would be delayed.  Now, in America, she had determined to make the best of a bad bargain by sending the fiery cross through the States.

She stayed in her room and jotted down notes.  Also, she conscientiously tried to make Mrs. Rolls a suffragette.  About most other things she was absent-minded; therefore Ena did not waste gray matter in worrying over the impression that Sea Gull Manor was making on Lady Raygan.

It was Rags and Eileen whose observing eyes and sense of humour had to be feared.  Eileen, for instance, had a little way of saying that anything she considered odd was “too endlessly quaint.”  Things she admired were “melting.”  If only Ena had known enough about earls and their families to be sure whether Lord Raygan and Eileen would, in their secret hearts, think the ways of the Rollses endlessly quaint or melting, she might have been spared sleepless nights.  Because the difference between those two adjectives would mean the difference between ecstasy and despair for her.  Rags might be poor for an earl, even an Irish earl, but he was hardly the sort to propose to a girl his sister could speak of as “endlessly quaint.”

Twelve days after they had arrived at Sea Gull Manor, Eileen wrote a somewhat ungrammatical letter to a rich cousin in Dublin who had once refused Rags, and in which she said: