Lady Groombridge was giving tea to the first arrivals when Mrs. Delaport Green and Molly were shown into the big hall of the Castle.

“Let us come for a walk; we can slip out through this window,” murmured Sir Edmund, as he took her empty tea-cup from his cousin.

Rose began to move, but Lady Groombridge claimed her attention before she could escape.

“Do you know Mrs. Delaport Green and Miss Dexter?”

Rose, as she heard Molly’s name, found herself looking quite directly into very unexpected and very remarkable grey eyes with dark lashes.  Her gentle but reserved greeting would have been particularly negative after Edmund’s warning as to both ladies, but she did not quite control a look of surprise and interest.  There was a great light in Molly’s face as she saw the young and beautiful woman whom she had dreaded intensely to meet.

Rose was evidently unconscious of a certain gentle pride of bearing, but was fully conscious of a wish to be kindly and loving.  In neither of these aspects—­and they were revealed in a glance to Molly—­did Rose attract her.  But Molly’s look, which puzzled Rose, was as a flame of feeling, burning visibly through the features of the dark, healthy face, and finding its full expression in the eyes.  The glory of the landscape she had just passed through, and the excitement of finding herself in such a building, added fuel to Molly’s feelings, and seemed to give a historic background to her meeting with her enemy.  Some subtle and curious sympathy lit Rose’s face for a moment, and then she shrank a little as if she recoiled from a slight shock, and turning with a smile to Sir Edmund Grosse, she followed him down the great hall and out into a passage beyond.  He had given Molly an intimate but rather careless nod before he turned away.

Edmund was quite silent as he walked out on the terrace, and seemed as absorbed as Rose in the view that lay below them.  But it was with the scene he had just witnessed inside the Castle that his mind was filled.  There had been something curiously dramatic in the meeting which he would have done a great deal to prevent.  But, annoyed as he was, he could not help dwelling for a moment on the picture of the two with a certain artistic satisfaction.  Rose, in her plain, almost poor, clinging black clothes was, as always, amazingly graceful; he felt, not for the first time, as if her every movement were music.

“But that girl is handsome.  How she looked into Rose’s face, the amazing little devil!—­she is plucky.”

Then he caught himself up abruptly; it was no use to talk nonsense to himself.  The point was how to keep these two apart and how short Mrs. Delaport Green’s visit might be made.

“Unluckily Monday is a Bank holiday, but they shall not be asked to stay one hour after the 10.30 train on Tuesday if I have to take them away myself,” he murmured.  Meanwhile, it was a beautiful evening; there was a wonderful view, and Rose was here, and, for the moment, alone with him.  She ran her fingers into the fair hair that was falling over her forehead, and pushed it back and her hat with it, so that the fresh spring air “may get right into my brain,” she said, “and turn out London blacks.”