go, but
almost before either of the two spoke she knew that a great gulf had
been crossed in some one inevitable, though unforeseen, leap. How it had
been taken, when or where, did not in the least matter, when she clung
to Betty and Betty clung to her.

After a few moments of moved and reverent waiting, the admirable
Jennings stepped forward and addressed her in lowered voice.

"There's been little sleep in the village this night, my lady," he
murmured earnestly. "I promised they should have a sign, with your
permission. If the flag was run up--they're all looking out, and they'd
know."

"Run it up, Jennings," Lady Anstruthers answered, "at once."

When it ran up the staff on the tower and fluttered out in gay answering
to the morning breeze, children in the village began to run about
shouting, men and women appeared at cottage doors, and more than one
cap was thrown up in the air. But old Doby and Mrs. Welden, who had been
waiting for hours, standing by Mrs. Welden's gate, caught each other's
dry, trembling old hands and began to cry.

The Broadmorlands divorce scandal, having made conversation during a
season quite forty years before Miss Vanderpoel appeared at Stornham
Court, had been laid upon a lower shelf and buried beneath other stories
long enough to be forgotten. Only one individual had not forgotten it,
and he was the Duke of Broadmorlands himself, in whose mind it remained
hideously clear. He had been a young man, honestly and much in love
when it first revealed itself to him, and for a few months he had even
thought it might end by being his death, notwithstanding that he was
strong and in first-rate physical condition. He had been a fine,
hearty young man of clean and rather dignified life, though he was not
understood to be brilliant of mind. Privately he had ideals connected
with his rank and name which he was not fluent enough clearly to
express. After he had realised that he should not die of the public
humiliation and disgrace, which seemed to point him out as having been
the kind of gullible fool it is scarcely possible to avoid laughing
at--or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy--he thought it
not improbable that he should go mad. He was harried so by memories of
lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of
the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of
kneeling down by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers.
This had so t