The letter from Curzon Street had not made the beauty shed tears.  Her face had fallen when it had been handed to her on her return, and she had taken it upstairs to her room with rather a flagging step.  But when she came down to lunch she walked with the movement of a nymph.  Her lovely little face wore a sort of tremulous radiance.  She laughed like a child at every amusing thing that was said.  She might have been ten years old instead of twenty-two, her colour, her eyes, her spirits seemed of a freshness so infantine.

She was leaning back in her chair laughing enchantingly at one of Miss Brooke’s sparkling remarks when Lord Walderhurst, who sat next to her, said suddenly, glancing round the table: 

“But where is Miss Fox-Seton?”

It was perhaps a significant fact that up to this moment nobody had observed her absence.  It was Lady Maria who replied.

“I am almost ashamed to answer,” she said.  “As I have said before, Emily Fox-Seton has become the lodestar of my existence.  I cannot live without her.  She has walked over to Maundell to make sure that we do not have a dinner-party without fish to-night.”

“She has walked over to Maundell,” said Lord Walderhurst—­“after yesterday?”

“There was not a pair of wheels left in the stable,” answered Lady Maria.  “It is disgraceful, of course, but she is a splendid walker, and she said she was not too tired to do it.  It is the kind of thing she ought to be given the Victoria Cross for—­saving one from a dinner-party without fish.”

The Marquis of Walderhurst took up the cord of his monocle and fixed the glass rigidly in his eye.

“It is not only four miles to Maundell,” he remarked, staring at the table-cloth, not at Lady Maria, “but it is four miles back.”

“By a singular coincidence,” said Lady Maria.

The talk and laughter went on, and the lunch also, but Lord Walderhurst, for some reason best known to himself, did not finish his.  For a few seconds he stared at the table-cloth, then he pushed aside his nearly disposed-of cutlet, then he got up from his chair quietly.

“Excuse me, Maria,” he said, and without further ado went out of the room, and walked toward the stables.

There was excellent fish at Maundell; Batch produced it at once, fresh, sound, and desirable.  Had she been in heir normal spirits, Emily would have rejoiced at the sight of it, and have retraced her four miles to Mallowe in absolute jubilation.  She would have shortened and beguiled her return journey by depicting to herself Lady Maria’s pleasure and relief.

But the letter from Mrs. Cupp lay like a weight of lead in her pocket.  It had given her such things to think of as she walked that she had been oblivious to heather and bees and fleece-bedecked summer-blue sky, and had felt more tired than in any tramp through London streets that she could call to mind.  Each step she took seemed to be carrying her farther away from the few square yards of home the bed-sitting-room had represented under the dominion of the Cupps.  Every moment she recalled more strongly that it had been home—­home.  Of course it had not been the third-floor back room so much as it had been the Cupps who made it so, who had regarded her as a sort of possession, who had liked to serve her, and had done it with actual affection.