“She is absolutely delicious,” Mrs. Warren said to her husband.  “That an adoration such as hers could exist in the nineteenth century is—­”

“Almost degenerate,” he laughed.

“Perhaps it is regenerate,” reflecting.  “Who knows!  Nothing earthly, or heavenly, would induce me to cast a doubt upon it.  Seated opposite to a portrait of her James, I hear her opinions of him, when she is not in the least aware of what her simplest observation conveys.  She does not know that she is including him when she is talking of other things, that one sees that while she is too shy to openly use his name much, the very breath of her life is a reference to him.  Her greatest bliss at present is to go unobtrusively into his special rooms and sit there dwelling upon his goodness to her.”

In fact Emily spent many a quiet hour in the apartments she had visited on the day of her farewell to her husband.  She was very happy there.  Her soul was uplifted by her gratitude for the peace she had reached.  The reports of Lord Walderhurst’s physician were never alarming and generally of a reassuring nature.  But she knew that he must exercise great caution, and that time must elapse before he could confront his return voyage.  He would come back as soon as was quite safe.  And in the meantime her world held all that she could desire, lacking himself.

Her emotion expressed itself in her earnest performance of her reverent daily devotions.  She read many chapters of the Bible, and often sat happily absorbed in the study of her Book of Common Prayer.  She found solace and happiness in such things, and spent her Sunday mornings, after the ringing of the church bells, quite alone in Walderhurst’s study, following the Service and reading the Collects and Lessons.  The room used to seem so beautifully still, even Berkeley Square wearing its church-hour aspect suggested devout aloofness from worldly things.

“I sit at the window and think,” she explained to Mrs. Warren.  “It is so nice there.”

She wrote her letters to India in this room.  She did not know how far the new courage in her thoughts of her husband expressed itself in these letters.  When Walderhurst read them, however, he felt a sense of change in her.  Women were sometimes spoken of as “coming out amazingly.”  He began to feel that Emily was, in a measure at least, “coming out.”  Perhaps her gradually increasing feeling of accustomedness to the change in her life was doing it for her.  She said more in her letters, and said it in a more interesting way.  It was perhaps rather suggestive of the development of a girl who was on the verge of becoming a delightful sort of woman.

Lying upon his back in bed, rendered, it may be, a trifle susceptible by the weakness of slow convalescence, he found a certain habit growing upon him—­a habit of reading her letters several times, and of thinking of her as it had not been his nature to think of women; also he slowly awakened to an interest in the arrival of the English mails.  The letters actually raised his spirits and had an excellent physical effect.  His doctor always found him in good condition after he had heard from his wife.