After breakfast she spent her morning in doing a hundred things for Lady Maria.  She wrote notes for her, and helped her to arrange plans for the entertainment of her visitors.  She was very busy and happy.  In the afternoon she drove across the moor to Maundell, a village on the other side of it.  She really went on an errand for her hostess, but as she was fond of driving and the brown cob was a beauty, she felt that she was being given a treat on a level with the rest of her ladyship’s generous hospitalities.  She drove well, and her straight, strong figure showed to much advantage on the high seat of the cart.  Lord Walderhurst himself commented on her as he saw her drive away.

“She has a nice, flat, straight back, that woman,” he remarked to Lady Maria.  “What is her name?  One never hears people’s names when one is introduced.”

“Her name is Emily Fox-Seton,” her ladyship answered, “and she’s a nice creature.”

“That would be an inhuman thing to say to most men, but if one is a thoroughly selfish being, and has some knowledge of one’s own character, one sees that a nice creature might be a nice companion.”

“You are quite right,” was Lady Maria’s reply, as she held up her lorgnette and watched the cart spin down the avenue.  “I am selfish myself, and I realise that is the reason why Emily Fox-Seton is becoming the lodestar of my existence.  There is such comfort in being pandered to by a person who is not even aware that she is pandering.  She doesn’t suspect that she is entitled to thanks for it.”

That evening Mrs. Ralph came shining to dinner in amber satin, which seemed to possess some quality of stimulating her to brilliance.  She was witty enough to collect an audience, and Lord Walderhurst was drawn within it.  This was Mrs. Ralph’s evening.  When the men returned to the drawing-room, she secured his lordship at once and managed to keep him.  She was a woman who could talk pretty well, and perhaps Lord Walderhurst was amused.  Emily Fox-Seton was not quite sure that he was, but at least he listened.  Lady Agatha Slade looked a little listless and pale.  Lovely as she was, she did not always collect an audience, and this evening she said she had a headache.  She actually crossed the room, and taking a seat by Miss Emily Fox-Seton, began to talk to her about Lady Maria’s charity-knitting which she had taken up.  Emily was so gratified that she found conversation easy.  She did not realise that at that particular moment she was a most agreeable and comforting companion for Agatha Slade.  She had heard so much of her beauty during the season, and remembered so many little things that a girl who was a thought depressed might like to hear referred to again.  Sometimes to Agatha the balls where people had collected in groups to watch her dancing, the flattering speeches she had heard, the dazzling hopes which had been raised, seemed a little unreal, as if, after all, they could have been only dreams.  This was particularly so, of course, when life had dulled for a while and the atmosphere of unpaid bills became heavy at home.  It was so to-day, because the girl had received a long, anxious letter from her mother, in which much was said of the importance of an early preparation for the presentation of Alix, who had really been kept back a year, and was in fact nearer twenty than nineteen.