But she would not question Mrs. Eccles about him; she encouraged her to talk of the dead and gone generations as much as she pleased, but of the man who was her master Vera would have thought it scarcely honourable to have spoken to his servant.  Perhaps, too, she preferred her dreams.  One day, idly opening the drawer of an old bureau in the little room which Mrs. Eccles always called religiously “My lady’s morning room,” Vera came upon a modern photograph that arrested her attention wonderfully.

It represented, however, nothing very remarkable; only a broad-shouldered, good-looking young man, with an aquiline noise and a close-cropped head.  On the reverse side of the card was written in pencil, “My son—­for Mrs. Eccles.”  Lady Kynaston, she supposed, must therefore have sent it to the old housekeeper, and of course it was Sir John.  Vera pushed it back again into the drawer with a little flush, as though she had been guilty of an indiscretion in looking at it, and she said no word of her discovery to the housekeeper.  A day or two later she sought for it again in the same place, but it had been taken away.

But the face thus seen made an impression upon her.  She did not forget it; and when Sir John Kynaston’s name was mentioned, she invested him with the living likeness of the photograph she had seen.

On this particular October morning that Vera strolled up idly to the old house she did not feel inclined to wander among the deserted rooms; the sunshine came down too pleasantly through the autumn leaves; the air was too full of the lingering breath of the dying summer for her to care to go indoors.  She paused a minute by the open window of the housekeeper’s room, and called the old lady by name.

The room, however, was empty and she received no answer, so she wandered on to the terrace and leant over the stone parapet that looked over the gardens and the fountains, and the distant park beyond, and she thought of the photograph in the drawer.

And then and there there came into Vera Neville’s mind a thought that, beginning with nothing more than an indistinct and idle fancy, ended in a set and determined purpose.

The thought was this:—­

“If Sir John Kynaston ever comes down here, I will marry him.”

She said it to herself, deliberately and calmly, without the slightest particle of hesitation or bashfulness.  She told herself that what her relations were perpetually impressing upon her concerning the desirableness of her marrying and making a home of her own, was perfectly just and true.  It would undoubtedly be a good thing for her to marry; her life was neither very pleasant nor very satisfactory to herself or to any one else.  She had never intended to end her days at Sutton Vicarage; it had only been an intermediate condition of things.  She had no vocation for visiting the poor, or for filling that useful but unexciting family office of maiden aunt; and, moreover, she felt that, with all their kindness to her, her brother-in-law and his wife ought not to be burdened with her support for longer than was necessary.  As to turning governess, or companion, or lady-help, there was an incongruity in the idea that made it too ludicrous to contemplate even for an instant.  There is no other way that a handsome and penniless woman can deliver her friends of the burden of her existence than by marriage.