“Your husband,” said Lotty, swinging her feet, “might be here quite soon, perhaps to-morrow evening if he starts at once, and there’ll be a glorious final few days before we all go home refreshed for life.  I don’t believe any of us will ever be the same again—­and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised of Caroline doesn’t end by getting fond of the young man Briggs.  It’s in the air.  You have to get fond of people here.”

Rose sat at her window thinking of these things.  Lotty’s optimism . . . yet it had been justified by Mr. Wilkins; and look, too, at Mrs. Fisher.  If only it would come true as well about Frederick!  For Rose, who between lunch and tea had left off thinking about Frederick, was now, between tea and dinner, thinking of him harder than ever.

It has been funny and delightful, that little interlude of admiration, but of course it couldn’t go on once Caroline appeared.  Rose knew her place.  She could see as well as any one the unusually, the unique loveliness of Lady Caroline.  How warm, though, things like admiration and appreciation made one feel, how capable of really deserving them, how different, how glowing.  They seemed to quicken unsuspected faculties into life.  She was sure she had been a thoroughly amusing woman between lunch and tea, and a pretty one too.  She was quite certain she had been pretty; she saw it in Mr. Briggs’s eyes as clearly as in a looking-glass.  For a brief space, she thought, she had been like a torpid fly brought back to gay buzzing by the lighting of a fire in a wintry room.  She still buzzed, she still tingled, just at the remembrance.  What fun it had been, having an admirer even for that little while.  No wonder people liked admirers.  They seemed, in some strange way, to make one come alive.

Although it was all over she still glowed with it and felt more exhilarated, more optimistic, more as Lotty probably constantly felt, than she had done since she was a girl.  She dressed with care, though she knew Mr. Briggs would no longer see her, but it gave her pleasure to see how pretty, while she was about it, she could make herself look; and very nearly she stuck a crimson camellia in her hair down by her ear.  She did hold it there for a minute, and it looked almost sinfully attractive and was exactly the colour of her mouth, but she took it out again with a smile and a sigh and put it in the proper place for flowers, which is water.  She mustn’t be silly, she thought.  Think of the poor.  Soon she would be back with them again, and what would a camellia behind her ear seem like then?  Simply fantastic.