rry, who were more or less good, more or less anti-pathetic, and for
whom society never had a word of reproach--but Jimmy! distinguished and
charming, with every taste and means to gratify them, with--so to put
it--the woman of his heart at his very doors--how did he live? Why,
for everybody in the world but for himself. And through it all, in
spite of the fact that he appeared blindly to shut his eyes against
their mutual love, he lived for her. Oh, he was the best, the best!

She listened as she stood there for the hum of the motor which might
tell her he was coming back. She wanted to ask him to tell her the
truth about The Dials. She wanted, above all else, to see him again.

She remembered them, one by one, the happy occasions they had caught
and made the most of, and each after the other they became lovely
harbors where like ships her thoughts lay at anchor. Penhaven was
certainly one of the best. She congratulated herself that she had
conceived that day, and without any blame she acknowledged it to
herself, that if Jimmy had only wished it they would have been there
together now.

She had taken her chair again and sat back deeply in the great
fauteuil. The brocade made a dark-hued background against which her
head, frankly thrown back, defined its charming lines. Her bare arms
folded across her breast, her foot swinging gently to and fro, she
continued to muse and dream, and as she thought of Bulstrode, to love
him.

Some one came in and piled up the fire and slipped out, but no message
was brought her to tell her what had become of her host and her friend.

The long sympathetic silence beginning at the fireside flowed through
the vast rooms and corridors, and out into the night, down the lanes
and the road until its completeness and tonelessness were broken by the
memory of the bells of Penhaven, as she and Jimmy had heard them whilst
they rang the angelus in the close. And the discordant note of The
Dials was drowned, confused and lost in her intense listening to the
Penhaven bells. Some chord or other, or some fine spring touched as
she so thought on, brought back to her the fact of the despatch
upstairs, which if it had any, had an imperative importance. Falconer
had sent it from Palm Beach where he had gone to get rid of a
troublesome grippe. He did not, in the few lines which told he was
seedy and had put off his sailing, suggest that she should go back.
But he would not resent her return,