The legacy left her by old Mrs. Maytham had been realised and deposited as a solid sum in a bank.  Since she need no longer hoard the income of twenty pounds a year, it was safe to draw upon her capital for her present needs.  The fact made her feel comfortable.  She could make her preparations for the change in her life with a decent independence.  She would have been definitely unhappy if she had been obliged to accept favours at this juncture.  She felt as if she could scarcely have borne it.  It seemed as if everything conspired to make her comfortable as well as blissfully happy in these days.

Lord Walderhurst found an interest in watching her and her methods.  He was a man who, in certain respects, knew himself very well and had few illusions respecting his own character.  He had always been rather given to matter-of-fact analysis of his own emotions; and at Mallowe he had once or twice asked himself if it was not disagreeably possible that the first moderate glow of his St. Martin’s summer might die away and leave him feeling slightly fatigued and embarrassed by the new aspect of his previously regular and entirely self-absorbed existence.  You might think that you would like to marry a woman and then you might realise that there were objections—­that even the woman herself, with all her desirable qualities, might be an objection in the end, that any woman might be an objection; in fact, that it required an effort to reconcile oneself to the fact of a woman’s being continually about.  Of course the arriving at such a conclusion, after one had committed oneself, would be annoying.  Walderhurst had, in fact, only reflected upon this possible aspect of affairs before he had driven over the heath to pick Emily up.  Afterwards he had, in some remote portion of his mentality, vaguely awaited developments.

When he saw Emily day by day at South Audley Street, he found he continued to like her.  He was not clever enough to analyse her; he could only watch her, and he always looked on at her with curiosity and a novel sensation rather like pleasure.  She wakened up at sight of him, when he called, in a way that was attractive even to an unimaginative man.  Her eyes seemed to warm, and she often looked flushed and softly appealing.  He began to note vaguely that her dresses were better, and oftener changed, than they had been at Mallowe.  A more observant man might have been touched by the suggestion that she was unfolding petal by petal like a flower, and that each carefully chosen costume was a new petal.  He did not in the least suspect the reverent eagerness of her care of herself as an object hoping to render itself worthy of his qualities and tastes.