“Lord Walderhurst will be told nothing?”

“Nothing until his recovery is complete.  Now that she has made a clean breast of everything to me and given herself into my hands, I believe that she finds a sentimental pleasure in the thought of keeping her secret until he returns.  I will confess to you, Mary, that I think that she has read of and tenderly sympathised with heroines who have done the like before.  She does not pose to herself as a heroine, but she dwells affectionately on ingenuous mental pictures of what Lord Walderhurst will say.  It is just as well that it should be so.  It is better for her than fretting would be.  Experience helped me to gather from the medical man’s letter that his patient is in no condition to be told news of any kind, good or bad.”

The house in Berkeley Square was reopened.  Lady Walderhurst returned to it, as it was understood below stairs, from a visit to some German health resort.  Mrs. Cupp and Jane returned with her.  The wife of her physician in attendance was with her a great deal.  It was most unfortunate for her ladyship that my lord was detained in India by illness.

The great household, having presented opened shutters to the world, went on in the even tenor of its way.  There brooded over it, however, a sort of hushed dignity of atmosphere.  The very housemaids wore an air of grave discretion.  Their labours assumed the proportions of confidential interested service, in which they felt a private pride.  Not one among them had escaped becoming attached to Lady Walderhurst.

Away from Palstrey, away from Mortimer Street, Emily began to find reality in the fact that everything had already become quite simple, after all.  The fine rooms looked so well ordered and decent in a stately way.  Melodramatic plotting ceased to exist as she looked at certain dignified sofas and impressive candelabra.  Such things became even more impossible than they had become before the convincingness of the first floor front bedroom in Mortimer Street, She began to give a good deal of thought to the summer at Mallowe.  There was an extraordinary luxury in living again each day of it, the morning when she had taken the third-class carriage which provided her with hot, labouring men in corduroys as companions, that fleeting moment when the tall man with the square face had passed the carriage and looked straight through her without seeming to see her at all.  She sat and smiled tenderly at the mere reminiscent thought.  And then the glimpse of him as he got into the high phaeton at the station; and the moment when Lady Maria had exclaimed “There’s Walderhurst,” and he had come swinging with his leisurely step across the lawn.  And he had scarcely seemed to see her then, or notice her really when they met, until the morning he had joined her as she gathered the roses and had talked to her about Lady Agatha.  But he had actually been noticing her a little even from the first—­he had been thinking about her