as a sort of duty.  It wasn’t his immorality particularly.  Nobody is either moral or immoral in these days, but penniless persons must be decent.  It’s all a matter of taste and manners.  I haven’t any morals myself, my dear, but I have beautiful manners.  A woman can have the kind of manners which keep her from breaking the Commandments.  As to the Commandments, they are awfully easy things not to break.  Who wants to break them, good Lord!  Thou shall do no murder.  Thou shalt not steal.  Thou shalt not commit, etc.  Thou shalt not bear false witness.  That’s simply gossip and lying, and they are bad manners.  If you have good manners, you don’t.”

She chatted on in her pungent little worldly, good-humoured way through the making of a very excellent lunch.  After which she settled her smart bonnet with clever touches, kissed Emily on both cheeks, and getting into her brougham rolled off smiling and nodding.

Emily stood at the drawing-room window and watched her equipage roll round the square and into Charles Street, and then turned away into the big, stately empty room, sighing without intending to do so while she smiled herself.

“She’s so witty and so amusing,” she said; “but one would no more think of telling her anything than one would think of catching a butterfly and holding it while one made it listen.  She would be so bored if she was confided in.”

Which was most true.  Never in her life had her ladyship allowed herself the indiscretion of appearing a person in whom confidences might be reposed.  She had always had confidences enough of her own to take care of, without sharing those of other people.

“Good heavens!” she had exclaimed once, “I should as soon think of assuming another woman’s wrinkles.”

On the first visit Lady Walderhurst made to The Kennel Farm the morning after her return to Palstrey, when Alec Osborn helped her from her carriage, he was not elated by the fact that he had never seen her look so beautifully alive and blooming during his knowledge of her.  There was a fine rose on her cheek, and her eyes were large and happily illumined.

“How well you look!” broke from him with an involuntariness he was alarmed to realise as almost spiteful.  The words were an actual exclamation which he had not meant to utter, and Emily Walderhurst even started a trifle and looked at him with a moment’s question.

“But you look well, too,” she answered.  “Palstrey agrees with both of us.  You have such a colour.”

“I have been riding,” he replied.  “I told you I meant to know Faustine thoroughly before I let you mount her.  She is ready for you now.  Can you take your first lesson to-morrow?”

“I—­I don’t quite know,” she hesitated.  “I will tell you a little later.  Where is Hester?”

Hester was in the drawing-room.  She was lying on a sofa before an open window and looking rather haggard and miserable.  She had, in fact, just had a curious talk with Alec which had ended in something like a scene.  As Hester’s health grew more frail, her temper became more fierce, and of late there had been times when a certain savagery, concealed with difficulty in her husband’s moods, affected her horribly.