How irritating and constrained it made him!  How prosaic!  How it walled-up passion, as one read how a nun who had loved too much was walled-up, in the old fierce days, with bricks and mortar!

  “MY DEAR MARIE,” (or sometimes “Dear Wifie"),—­

“How are you all getting along?  I’m in ——­ now, as you will see by my changed address.  Business has been fairly good....  It was rather a pretty journey here; I must send George a book about the wild flowers on the prairies....  I am glad to hear you are all so comfortable.  Are you going earlier to Littlehampton this year, or shall you wait till the summer as usual?  Of course, when I went with you, we had to go in the summer because my turn for holidays came then; but I should think the rooms would be cheaper earlier in the year.  I am rather glad you are having the carpet cleaned....

  “With love to you and the children,

  “YOUR AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND.”

In the spring a sorrow came with a shock into Marie’s even life.  Grannie Amber died suddenly.  In the evening she had played with the children at No. 30, and in the morning she was found in the little old-fashioned flat on the other side of the Heath, sitting in her easychair by a dead fire, with her bonnet and cloak on, just as she had sat down to rest for awhile on her return.

She left her daughter a good deal of old furniture which sold for a fair sum to dealers; and an income of two hundred and twenty pounds a year.

For a while sorrow kept Marie much to the rut in which she had moved since Osborn’s departure; but the grief for a parent is so natural and inevitable a grief; it is not as the grief for a husband or a child; and when the first warm days of April came Marie took some very definite steps forward on that road where she had, last December, set her feet.  It was Julia who roused her finally to the course.

Julia came and said:  “Do you know, my dear, you’re years younger?  You’re your pretty self again.  And what are you going to do now that you are such a rich young woman?”

It was a week later that the capable maid was installed in the flat.  She slept in a tiny room which had hitherto been relegated to boxes, but which now was furnished with one or two left-over pieces from Mrs. Amber’s sale, and the hall-porter, who realised that Mrs. Osborn Kerr had inherited money, was pleased to care for the boxes.  The servant brought rest and charm into that flat; and George went half-daily to a near-by school, taking himself to and fro with the utmost manfulness.

Marie paid at last those longed-for visits to the dentist.

* * * * *

Marie was having the first dinner-party for which she had not to cook herself, and the party consisted of Julia and Desmond Rokeby.

Rokeby had leapt at the invitation flatteringly; but Julia had been inscrutable in her demur, until begged in such terms as were hard to refuse.