Mrs. Staines was much agitated at the very name of Lord Tadcaster; but she would not have missed seeing him for the world.

She received him with her beautiful eyes wide open, to drink in every lineament of one who had seen the last of her Christopher.

Tadcaster was wonderfully improved:  he had grown six inches out at sea, and though still short, was not diminutive; he was a small Apollo, a model of symmetry, and had an engaging, girlish beauty, redeemed from downright effeminacy by a golden mustache like silk, and a tanned cheek that became him wonderfully.

He seemed dazzled at first by Mrs. Staines, but murmured that Lady Cicely had told him to come, or he would not have ventured.

“Who can be so welcome to me as you?” said she, and the tears came thick in her eyes directly.

Soon, he hardly knew how, he found himself talking of Staines, and telling her what a favorite he was, and all the clever things he had done.

The tears streamed down her cheeks, but she begged him to go on telling her, and omit nothing.

He complied heartily, and was even so moved by the telling of his friend’s virtues, and her tears and sobs, that he mingled his tears with hers.  She rewarded him by giving him her hand as she turned away her tearful face to indulge the fresh burst of grief his sympathy evoked.

When he was leaving, she said, in her simple way, “Bless you”—­“Come again,” she said:  “you have done a poor widow good.”

Lord Tadcaster was so interested and charmed, he would gladly have come back next day to see her; but he restrained that extravagance, and waited a week.

Then he visited her again.  He had observed the villa was not rich in flowers, and he took her down a magnificent bouquet, cut from his father’s hot-houses.  At sight of him, or at sight of it, or both, the color rose for once in her pale cheek, and her pensive face wore a sweet expression of satisfaction.  She took his flowers, and thanked him for them, and for coming to see her.

Soon they got on the only topic she cared for, and, in the course of this second conversation, he took her into his confidence, and told her he owed everything to Dr. Staines.  “I was on the wrong road altogether, and he put me right.  To tell you the truth, I used to disobey him now and then, while he was alive, and I was always the worse for it; now he is gone, I never disobey him.  I have written down a lot of wise, kind things he said to me, and I never go against any one of them.  I call it my book of oracles.  Dear me, I might have brought it with me.”

“Oh, yes! why didn’t you?” rather reproachfully.

“I will bring it next time.”

“Pray do.”

Then she looked at him with her lovely swimming eyes, and said tenderly, “And so here is another that disobeyed him living, but obeys him dead.  What will you think when I tell you that I, his wife, who now worship him when it is too late, often thwarted and vexed him when he was alive?”