“Your letters, my dear Emily,” Walderhurst once wrote, “are a great pleasure to me.  You are to-day exactly as you were at Mallowe,—­the creature of amiable good cheer.  Your comfort stimulates me.”

“How dear, how dear?” Emily cried to the silence of the study, and kissed the letter with impassioned happiness.

[Illustration:  Lady Maria Bayne]

The next epistle went even farther.  It absolutely contained “things” and referred to the past which it was her joy to pour libations before in secret thought.  When her eye caught the phrase “the days at Mallowe” in the middle of a sheet, she was almost frightened at the rush of pleasure which swept over her.  Men who were less aloof from sentimental moods used such phrases in letters, she had read and heard.  It was almost as if he had said “the dear old days at Mallowe” or “the happy days at Mallowe,” and the rapture of it was as much as she could bear.

“I cannot help remembering as I lie here,” she read in actual letters as she went on, “of the many thoughts which passed through my mind as I drove over the heath to pick you up.  I had been watching you for days.  I always liked particularly your clear, large eyes.  I recall trying to describe them to myself and finding it difficult.  They seemed to me then to resemble something between the eyes of a very nice boy and the eyes of a delightful sheep-dog.  This may not appear so romantic a comparison as it really is.”

Emily began most softly and sweetly to cry.  Nothing more romantic could she possibly have imagined.

“I thought of them in spite of myself as I drove across the moor, and I could scarcely express to you how angry I was at Maria.  It seemed to me that she had brutally imposed on you only because she had known she might impose on a woman with such a pair of eyes.  I was angry and sentimental at one and the same time.  And to find you sitting by the wayside, absolutely worn out with fatigue and in tears, moved me really more than I had anticipated being moved.  And when you mistook my meaning and stood up, your nice eyes looking into mine in such ingenuous appeal and fear and trouble, I have never forgotten it, my dear, and I never shall.”

His mood of sentiment did not sit easily upon him, but it meant a real and interesting quite human thing.

Emily sat alone in the room and brooded over it as a mother might brood over a new-born child.  She was full of tremulous bliss, and, dwelling with reverent awe upon the wonder of great things drawing nearer to her every hour, wept for happiness as she sat.

* * * * *

The same afternoon Lady Maria Bayne arrived.  She had been abroad taking, in no dull fashion, various “cures,” which involved drinking mineral waters while promenading to the sounds of strains of outdoor music, and comparing symptoms wittily with friends equal to amazing repartee in connection with all subjects.