They pulled up their two comfortable arm-chairs to the sparkling wood fire, and then Colonel Lowerby said: 

“You look sad, Queen Anne.  Tell me about it.”

“Yes, I am sad,” said Anne.  “The position is so hopeless.  Hector loves her—­loves her really—­and I do not wonder at it; and she seems just everything that one could wish for him.  A thousand times above Morella in intellect and understanding.  All the things Hector and I like she sees at once.  No need of explaining to her, as one has to to mother and Morella always.”

“Yes,” said the Crow.  He did not argue with her as usual.

“It seems so fearful to think of her forever bound to that dreadful old grocer, whom she treats with so much deference and gentleness.  The whole thing has made me sad.  Hector is perfectly miserable; and, do you know, they are going to Beechleigh for Whitsuntide.  Sir Patrick Fitzgerald is her uncle—­and, of course, Hector is going, too, and—­”

She did not finish her sentence.  Her voice died away in a pathetic note as she gazed into the fire.

The Crow fidgeted; he had been devoted to Anne since she was a child of ten, and he hated to see her troubled.

“Look here,” he said.  “I investigated her thoroughly at luncheon, and I don’t often make a mistake, do I?”

“No,” said Anne.  “Well—?”

“Well, she appeared to me to have some particular quality of sweetness—­you were right about her looking like an angel—­and I think she has got an angel’s nature more or less; and when people are really like that there is some one up above looks after them, and I don’t think we need worry much—­you and I.”

“Dear old Crow!” said Anne; “you do comfort me.  But all the same, angel or not, Hector is so attractive—­and he is a man, you know, not one of these anaemic, artistic, aesthetic things we see about so often now; and thrown together like that—­how on earth will they be able to help themselves?”

The Crow was silent.

“You see,” she continued, “beyond Morella, who is too absolutely unalluring and respectable to come to harm anywhere, and Miss Linwood, who only cares for bridge, there will hardly be another woman in the house who has not got a lover, and the atmosphere of those things is catching—­don’t you think so?”

“It is nature,” said Colonel Lowerby.  “A woman in possession of her health and faculties requires a mate, and when her husband is attending to sport or some other man’s wife, she is bound to find one somewhere.  I don’t blame the poor things.”

“Oh, nor I!” said Anne.  “I don’t ever blame any one.  And just one, because you love him, seems all right, perhaps.  It is six different ones in a year, and a seventh to pay the bills, that I find vulgar.”

“Dans les premieres passions, les femmes aiment l’amant; et dans les autres, elles aiment l’amour,” quoted the Crow.  “It was ever the same, you see.  It is the seventh to pay the bills that seems vulgar and modern.”