“It seems so home-like,” she said; adding courageously, “it is a very comfortable place, really.”

“We can make it much more cheerful, my lady,” Jane said, with grateful appreciation.  “And the relief makes it like Paradise.”  She was leaving the room and stopped at the door.  “There’s not a person, black or white, can get across the door-mat, past mother and me, until his lordship comes,” she allowed herself the privilege of adding.

Emily felt a little nervous when she pictured to herself Lord Walderhurst crossing the door-mat of a house in Mortimer Street in search of his Marchioness.  She had not yet had time to tell him the story of the episode of the glass of milk and Hester Osborn’s sudden outburst.  Every moment had been given to carefully managed arrangement for the journey which was to seem so natural.  Hester’s cleverness had suggested every step and had supported her throughout.  But for Hester she was afraid she might have betrayed herself.  There had been no time for writing.  But when James received her letter (of late she had more than once thought of him as “James"), he would know the one thing that was important.  And she had asked him to come to her.  She had apologised for suggesting any alteration of his plans, but she had really asked him to come to her.

“I think he will come,” she said to herself.  “I do think he will.  I shall be so glad.  Perhaps I have not been sensible, perhaps I have not done the best thing, but if I keep myself safe until he comes back, that really seems what is most important.”

Two or three days in the familiar rooms, attended only by the two friendly creatures she knew so well, seemed to restore the balance of life for her.  Existence became comfortable and prosaic again.  The best bedroom and the room in which she spent her days were made quite cheerful through Jane’s enterprise and memories of the appointments of Palstrey.  Jane brought her tea in the morning, Mrs. Cupp presided over the kitchen.  The agreeable doctor, whose reputation they had heard so much of, came and went, leaving his patient feeling that she might establish a friendship.  He looked so clever and so kind.

She began to smile her childlike smile again.  Mrs. Cupp and Jane told each other in private that if she had not been a married lady, they would have felt that she was Miss Fox-Seton again.  She looked so like herself, with her fresh colour and her nice, cheerful eyes.  And yet to think of the changes there had been, and what they had gone through!

People in London know nothing—­or everything—­of their neighbours.  The people who lived in Mortimer Street were of the hard-worked lodging-house keeping class, and had too many anxieties connected with butcher’s bills, rent, and taxes, to be able to give much time to their neighbours.  The life in the house which had changed hands had nothing noticeable about it.  It looked from the outside as it had always looked.