But Emily Fox-Seton was glad too that Sir Bruce was young, that they were all young, and that happiness had come before they had had time to tire of waiting for it.  She was so happy herself that she questioned nothing.

“Yes.  It is nice,” she answered, and glowed with honest sympathy.  “You will want to do the same things.  It is so agreeable when people who are married like to do the same things.  Perhaps you will want to go out a great deal and to travel, and you could not enjoy it if Sir Bruce did not.”

She was not reflecting in the least upon domestic circles whose male heads are capable of making themselves extremely nasty under stress of invitations it bores them to accept, and the inclination of wives and daughters to desire acceptance.  She was not contemplating with any premonitory regrets a future in which, when Walderhurst did not wish to go out to dinner or disdained a ball, she should stay at home.  Far from it.  She simply rejoiced with Lady Agatha, who was twenty-two marrying twenty-eight.

“You are not like me,” she explained further.  “I have had to work so hard and contrive so closely that everything will be a pleasure to me.  Just to know that I never need starve to death or go into the workhouse is such a relief that—­”

“Oh!” exclaimed Lady Agatha, quickly and involuntarily laying a hand on hers, startled by the fact that she spoke as if referring to a wholly matter-of-fact possibility.

Emily smiled, realising her feeling.

“Perhaps I ought not to have said that.  I forgot.  But such things are possible when one is too old to work and has nothing to depend on.  You could scarcely understand.  When one is very poor one is frightened, because occasionally one cannot help thinking of it.”

“But now—­now!  Oh! how different!” exclaimed Agatha, with heartfelt earnestness.

“Yes.  Now I need never be afraid.  It makes me so grateful to—­Lord Walderhurst.”

Her neck grew pink as she said it, just as Lady Maria had seen it grow pink on previous occasions.  Moderate as the words were, they expressed ardour.

Lord Walderhurst came in half an hour later and found her standing smiling by the window.

“You look particularly well, Emily.  It’s that white frock, I suppose.  You ought to wear a good deal of white,” he said.

“I will,” Emily answered.  He observed that she wore the nice flush and the soft appealing look, as well as the white frock.  “I wish—­”

Here she stopped, feeling a little foolish.

“What do you wish?”

“I wish I could do more to please you than wear white—­or black—­when you like.”

He gazed at her, always through the single eyeglass.  Even the vaguest approach to emotion or sentiment invariably made him feel stiff and shy.  Realising this, he did not quite understand why he rather liked it in the case of Emily Fox-Seton, though he only liked it remotely and felt his own inaptness a shade absurd.