sorry I startled you. But Mr. Tottenham has been telling me all about
what you did for the soldiers the time plague broke out in the lines at
Mian-Mir. I think it was splendid, mamma, and so does he.'

'Oh, Lord!' I groaned. 'Good night.'

Chapter 1.IV.

It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the
trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It seemed
to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had yet offered
itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer content to bring solace
and support to the more appealing figure of the situation; he must set
to work, bless him! to improve the situation itself. He must try to
induce Miss Farnham, by telling her everything he could remember to
my credit, to think as well of her mother as possible, in spite of the
strange and secret blows which that mother might be supposed to sit
up at night to deliver to her. Cecily thought very well of me already;
indeed, with private reservations as to my manners and--no, NOT my
morals, I believe I exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new
and untrained mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she
found me all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the
outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning and
wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must have
allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not to see
that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my impotence, did
not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however, he had created
our relations differently; evidently he had set himself to their
amelioration. There was portent in it; things seemed to be closing in. I
bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden pen-handle in considering whether
or not I should mention it in my letter to John, and decided that it
would be better just perhaps to drop a hint. Though I could not expect
John to receive it with any sort of perturbation. Men are different; he
would probably think Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.

I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the
saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious
and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had
nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking
for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me
and alarm assailed me.