o her
letter.

The Cloverdales' ball had come and gone, and Lady Kynaston had taken
pains to ensure that an invitation might be sent to Mrs. Hazeldine and
Miss Nevill. She had also put herself to some inconvenience in order to
be present at it herself, but all to no purpose--Vera was not there.
Perhaps she had had another engagement that evening.

The old lady's promise to her youngest son was still unfulfilled. She
half repented now that she had given him any such promise. What good was
she to do by interceding between her son and Miss Nevill? and why was she
to lay herself open to the chance of a rebuff from that young lady? It
had been a senseless and quixotic idea on Maurice's part altogether.
Young women do not take back a jilted lover because the man's mother
advises them to do so; nor is a broken-off marriage likely to get itself
re-settled in consequence of the interference of a third person.

The old lady had taken out her fancy-work, a piece of crewel work such as
is the fashion of the day. But she was not fond of work; the leaves of
muddy-shaded greens grew but slowly under her fingers, and, truth to say,
the occupation bored her. It was artistic, certainly, and it was
fashionable; but Lady Kynaston would have been happier over a pair of
cross-stitch slippers for her son, or a knitted woollen petticoat for the
old woman at her lodge gate. All the same, she took out her crewels and
put in a few stitches; but the afternoon was warm, there was a humming of
insects in the summer air, a click-clicking from the gardener as he
dropped one empty red flower-pot into the other along the edge of the
ribbon border, a cawing of rooks from the elms over the wall, a very
harmony of soft soothing sounds, just enough to lull worry to rest, not
enough to scare drowsiness from one's brain.

By degrees, it all became mixed up in a delicious confusion. The rooks,
and the bees, and the gardener made one continuous murmur to her, like
the swishing of summer waves upon a sandy shore, or the moaning of soft
winds in the tree tops.

Then the crewel work slipped off her lap, and Lady Kynaston slept.

How long she was asleep she could not rightly have said: it might have
been an hour, it might have been but twenty minutes; but suddenly she
awoke with a start.

The rustle of a woman's dress was beside her, and somebody spoke her
name.

"Lady Kynaston! Oh, I am so sorry I have disturbed you; I did not see you
were asleep."

Th